the liquid grateful star ether that connects us

and that healing feeling

I Ask My Mother to Sing

by Li-Young Lee

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.

From Rose by Li-Young Lee, BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986

---

Listen to Li-Young Lee read this poem ~

---

Creative Invitation

What songs did the ones who raised you, teach you? Let one song rise to mind. How does that song make you feel? Write it, or try to sing it.

---

A Personal Note

Dear friends,

I'm in New Orleans again, thundery and dazzling bright. I came back fast because my mother fell from a high place and broke her precious ribs, ribs number four through twelve. Ribcage, home of lungs & heart, knit thyself! Bone to bone to tendon to muscle. Tea, warm; and food, handmade, lift her. Tree, squirrel, bird in window, lift her up. Bright mama, adapting to swirl, to new body, to pain and the killers of pain. Rented hospital bed, new living location. Walking tippy, arms around waist, we are girls learning walking 80 years backward, slowly, slowly. Everything takes two to four hands. Grateful: she is healing. grateful for my brother who found her fallen and brought her to the hospital, for the groans of electric bed, for hospital couches, nurses and now for my twin mattress on the floor of a new room, mattress carried by my brother on the car roof, minifridge inside, groceries to cook for her. Slowly move, grateful, ribs heal, nap, eat, warm, love, sing. If you have a thought of her, please send a pulse into the liquid grateful star fabric nerve ether we share.

xo,

Abriel

P.S. Here she is eight days out from her ladder skydive, in my sleep t-shirt & happy to be alive!