Mom’s Gone, at the Age of a Hundred

Without Her, Our Eldest Sister Became Mom

She’s Eighty-Six, Died on August Sixth

And I Have, No More Moms

Childhood was Hard, Vanished Inside the Yam Fields of My Childhood Years

Back Then, My Eldest Sister Often Took Me

In the Harvested Peanut Fields of Someone Else’s

to Dig Up the Missed Peanuts, Called Them

Fallen Peanuts; the Peanuts that Didn’t Get Harvested

Would Hide Underground, Start Budding after the Rain

Showed Their Heads,

My Sister Would Tell Me, Here, the Peanuts are, Hiding

As I Grew Older, I’d Understood

We Had No Family-Owned Inheritances, No Relations

But the Land Took Care of Us

We’d Not Needed to Steal, to Rob————

Being Righteous and Acting Right is Most Important:  Since

I Was Younger, My Eldest Sister Taught to Me, and I’d, Followed Her Teachings My Whole Life Too

The Bitterness I’d Tasted, Comparable to that of Bitter Melons’

But After I’d Tasted All the Bitterness of Life, Nothing Tasted Bitter Anymore

Now, I’d, Tasted that Sweetness from Recalling Those Days of Bitter

And the Only Thing that Felt Bitter Was, Not Having My Mother, or My Eldest Sister Anymore

They’d Both, Became that Condensed Tea Extracted from the Bitter Melons and the Yellow Lotus Seeds

So, this is a recall, of one’s own younger years, seeing how far the individual had come in her/his life, and, the narrator had great examples, her/his mother and eldest sister, to help her/him grow into a responsible, able-bodied person, and after they’re gone, s/he felt, that bitterness of life…