What my family has left me. |
My mother— She runs her fingers through my hair, Thick, gnarled, and twisting, Like the branches of a starfruit tree, And dark as the raven who eats the fruits In return for wealth and gold, Just like in her whispered stories From a time long forgotten. Tear apart the bird's nest, Brush out all the knots— The friction'll kill the frizz. The strands don't cry when they fall, And neither does she. She taught me how to let things go, Like the raven unable to carry The burden of a man and his greed, Dropping them for the ocean waves To swallow in its depths. And so I let go, Until there was nothing Left to hold on to, And I was the one who fell; Weightless, Yet sinking all the same. My father— Blurry eyes, like looking through A perpetual veil woven of the white silk Spun by the spiders that hang In the quiet corners Where he hides his guilt. Glasses magnify the illusions Through which we live and lie, That I don't dare to shatter For fear of getting cut on broken pieces. See farther, climb higher. Ambition is the curse for which he sold His soul, and mine. I never learned how to land: I fall to the South, and down he looks At me from up in the North. Again and again, Until with every futile discourse, I understood how compliance Was the bitter black tea he drank In the mornings that stained The white porcelain cups When left disregarded. My grandmother— Fingers thin and crooked, Like the knobbly twigs that litter The untouched ground of her garden And crunch underfoot. With her hands, she taught me how They could weave grace and diligence Between knitting needles, and how They could stir beauty and patience Into sweet red-bean puddings That warmed my insides in the winter But spoiled all too quickly in the summer. She taught me how to stitch together Patches of soft cotton and wool, But not how to mend the tattered holes Ripped into the fabric Of our relationship. My grandfather— Notebooks of a time now but a memory, When a war filled streets with spilled blood And filled pages with spilled ink, Spilled secrets of a silent history In a language I can spell but not speak. He sleeps amongst the stars In a cosmos outside my mind, And between us stretches a broken line, From which hangs the heavy weight Of our everlasting solitude. From my family, I have learned The secrets of silence, An unspoken shadow that lingers Behind me as I walk. |