The Youngest Daughter - Poem #7

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 turned out to be a bit confusing for me the first read through, I say this because I know that it’s in the perspective of the daughter but that’s all we know. What has happened to the father or the family? I ask because the sentence ‘It seems it has always been like this: the two of us’ is what made me feel that something has had to occur for it to be just the two of them , so what happened? I enjoy reading the bond between the mother and daughter that is being talked about here because it reminds me of the relationship I have with my mother and step mother. Two different relationships but both have a lot of meaning to me. But anyway, this poem seems that they are taking care of each other. The daughter seems to be having migraines from situation which is why her mother is rubbing her temples, trying to make her feel better. Then after that it talks about how the daughter is trying to help the mother take a bath, but that is all that it says. Is there something wrong with the mother? We don’t seem to know the relationship if it’s even good or bad. All we seem to know is that there is a mother and a daughter, there is a bond and there is nothing being said about a family or what has happened. This seems to be a free verse poem, but it seems to be written more as a story then a poem, why? Overall, this poem seems to have so little information, but we can interpret it however we see it.