the Korean wheelbarrow

“i’m ninety-four”
“i’m eighty-nine”
“he is seventy-nine with parkinson
for the last eleven years”
“year after next, Joyce will celebrate
her hundred”, i’m told
with some exultation
higher, the greater
i see, tens of men and women in wheel chair
may be around fifty-nine

then, in my heart, i silent-ly ponder

the need to re-invent the Korean
wheelbarrow that no one
would see me in that wheel chair

Note: Here is a little story my late father, when he was around seventy-eight, read it in a Sri Lankan newspaper, possibly The Island, and passed it on to me. He at that time did not realize that I had already read it. I also heard him telling the same story to my seven-year old daughter, who at that moment, perhaps, did not see the punch line!

A son, the story began, in Korea was fast reaching his middle age put his elderly father in a wheelbarrow and began to push it towards the dump. His adolescent son seeing the father taking the grandfather to the dirt deposit, seriously said, “Dad, please take care to bring back the wheelbarrow”!