moon song
there’s a Chinese concept
to sǎng yuè
admire the moon
celestial contemplation above
my daughter sings
songs of twinkling stars
as I did when I was her age
in both Chinese and English
star, xīng
xīng can mean both star and heart
my mother taught me
evenings, she would recite
a classical poem of the moon
and the longing for home
gū xiāng, hometown
my child is named in the Spanish
of our neighborhood
Luna, moon
Luna bears her Filipino father’s surname
her mother’s family name in Chinese
Chinese names don’t change
after marriage
I hyphenated my name
connecting past (father-man)
and future (husband-man)
my daughter counts on her fingers
one, two, three
yī, èr, sān
uno, dos, tres
isa, duha, tatlo
Bisaya-Ilongo, father tongue
Mandarin, mother tongue
placing words in her mouth
tongue-tie her to half-forgotten cultures
long-lost hometowns
jiā, home, family
written with a roof over
the head of a pig
a pig turns a house to a home
to be multilingual is to process existence
in multiple universes, states of being
quantum superposition of self
to hear a word’s simultaneous
echoes and history
translations and homophones
mama, my daughter says
in every language she knows
to intuit connotations
define the untranslatable
understand a simple word in one language
can be a curse in another
as being biological female is a fact
a curse or blessing in context
marking my life in months
xuě, blood
xuě, snow
snow-covered land, moon-gleaming
in that classic mother-poem
a cycle of new to full, dark to bright
and back again
as when I talk to my mother
Chinese to English and back
a hundred transitions
in a single conversation
my mother’s ancestors were farmers
dependent on the lunar cycles
I wonder if she remembers them
when she sǎng yuè
at the same moon that shone for her mother,
for her daughters,
for my daughter,
harvest-moon-born
who sees the moon and thinks of herself