Poem #3

The Youngest Daughter

BY CATHY SONG

The sky has been dark

for many years.

My skin has become as damp

and pale as rice paper

and feels the way

mother’s used to before the drying sun   

parched it out there in the fields.

     Lately, when I touch my eyelids,

my hands react as if

I had just touched something

hot enough to burn.

My skin, aspirin colored,   

tingles with migraine. Mother

has been massaging the left side of my face   

especially in the evenings   

when the pain flares up.

This morning

her breathing was graveled,

her voice gruff with affection   

when I wheeled her into the bath.   

She was in a good humor,

making jokes about her great breasts,   

floating in the milky water

like two walruses,

flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.   

I scrubbed them with a sour taste   

in my mouth, thinking:

six children and an old man

have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender

when I came to the blue bruises

that freckle her body,

places where she has been injecting insulin   

for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,

she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.

It seems it has always

been like this: the two of us

in this sunless room,

the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons

when she has rested,

she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,   

garnished with a shred of gingered fish,

a slice of pickled turnip,

a token for my white body.   

We eat in the familiar silence.

She knows I am not to be trusted,   

even now planning my escape.   

As I toast to her health

with the tea she has poured,

a thousand cranes curtain the window,

fly up in a sudden breeze.

      In the past before my grandmother died my dad was her home nurse. I watched her become more frail as time went on. Saw the bruises form after the slightest touch on her skin. It was painful for all of us who loved her to see. Her body was rebelling and had been for long years before this, and eventually she couldn’t fight any more so she gave up the painful days for peace. It is hard to read any writing about this subject matter without thinking of my grandmother who enduring something similar. When the speaker begins talking about how they are so stressed (assuming so) to the point where their eyelids hurt (my eyes burn when I am extremely tired…) I can relate because I saw my father rub his eyes many times. This whole storyline of the poem is just upsetting. The first stanza where the speaker is talking about the changes in both of the characters is dramatic, because the passage of time is shown throughout them. Actually the passage of time is shown throughout the poem because we see the memories of the mother as she was throughout her life in contrast with how she is in the current point. This raises personal questions and wonders about my future… will I one day rely on my children in this way? Anyway, at the end where the speaker says, “She knows I am not to be trusted [...]” I at first thought she meant because she is going to poison the mom old woman, but then once I read it over again I realized the speaker meant that the old woman cannot trust that the speaker will be there forever to take care of her. The speaker wants her freedom to be able to live her own life. That is only human.