Remembering the lessons taught to you by your eldest sister and mother, and, they’re, no longer here, translated…
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…