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Column 466

I Ask My Mother to Sing

Intro by Ted Kooser
02.23.2014

Li-Young Lee is an impor­tant Amer­i­can poet of Chi­nese parent­age who lives in Chica­go. Much of his poet­ry is marked by unabashed ten­der­ness, and this poem is a good exam­ple of that.

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.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee. Poem reprinted by permission of Li-Young Lee and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.