The Youngest Daughter
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.
This poem happens to be one of my favorites and I can't explain why but I think because it seems to describe the relationship of a mother and daughter. When I first read the poem a thought of the death of a mother because the daughter was describing her as sick. She made me visualize the way her mother had diabetes and couldn't take care of herself. I also came across the thought that the daughter was white because of the way she describes her skin as pale. What confused me was the way she was taking care of her mother. I believe of african american culture? Something in this poem keeps throwing me off. I think its when she says "She knows I am not to be trusted." BUT WHY? I'm so lost. She seems to be her mothers caregiver but she isn't trusted. She literally bathes her. I mean I'd give trust to someone that bathed me and took care of me on a daily basis. I think i'm over thinking a bit but every time I read this poem that line just throws me off completely. The way the mother's body is becoming old seems to be symbolic because the narrator talks about how she herself is having problems with her own skin. This poem interests me. At one point I thought of this to be a little after the time of slavery because of the way the daughter says that her skin feels like her mothers skin when she worked the fields.
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