Shin Yu Pai ------- three poems

solids

simmered rice in bone
broth builds sinews

the first solids I feed
my infant son,

other mothers said
Cheerios sugared cereals

give him your word he’ll know
the taste of cheeseburgers,

cake – & yet the whole
family’s gone gluten-free

grueling, the first pablum
my father received

when his mother had
an abscessed breast,

a wooden stick dipped
in porridge what

he nursed  in the absence
of milk supply, powder

food shortages in wartime
no longer in a state

of famine,  I affirm
my own accord

plots

I don’t know the trail
to my grandparents’

graves, knowledge the men
folk keep for themselves

secrets passed down from
fathers to sons where

the bodies are buried
behind the house,

on Ao Feng mountain
we wade through waist-

high grass my uncle
leading the way beats

back weeds with bamboo
pole, the path kept hidden

my aunts left out
of decision-making

when it came to gathering up
the bones of the family

ancestors, urns buried
deep in the earth to be

exhumed for a final
resting place, in reunion,

what they found, empty
plots robbed of their relics

stolen by an angry forebearer
to make fools, worshipping

dust, long gone

paper craft

folded cranes delight
my 9-month-old boy,

birds strung on red thread
circle the living room,

forms my mother fashioned
nine years ago for a wedding

blessings, I gave away to guests
not knowing until years later

embedded within hundreds
of origami bodies, my father

contributed a single bird,
the pattern of which he shared

with no one; I try to see
his hand, a shape folded

from common copy
paper embellished with

inked hearts proof of love

my son’s eyes brighten
when they float past his gaze,

awake in the early hush of
morning while his dad sleeps

I picture cranes, bald eagles,
double-crested cormorants,

& grebes filling the skies
around the manmade lake

my earliest memory: my brother
away at pre-school, my father

drove us to the foothills of
the Santa Anas each day to give

my mother respite from
tears, a time

when I couldn’t yet grasp
that my brother would return

home; washi relics crumple
in an instant in the fists

of an infant, my father waited
days to hold, citing allergies,

a cough, when what he feared
most – harming another,

birds supporting the frailty
of our feeling, an object

impermanence, a child’s
wonder yoking us together