A Quiet Inheritance

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.