I Ask My Mother to Sing
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.
by Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee is the author of four collections of poetry, three from BOA Editions: Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986) which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon & Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A second edition of The Winged Seed: A Remembrance was published by BOA in 2013 which included a new forward by the author.