Momma's Fault

In China, the mother takes the blame for everything.

I heard my daughter, the black swan, say,
“I can’t stand properly in my toe shoes.”

“It’s momma’s fault,” my wife replied.
“You were born with imperfect feet.”

 

Everything is momma’s fault.

 

Chinese women,
To quote my wife,
Are grass to be stepped on.

 

Mao’s wife was called
The White Boned Demon,
Hated in China,
Blamed for the Cultural Revolution.

“I was Mao’s dog,” she yelled
At her trial.
“When he said to bite, I did.”

 

Mao is George Washington to a billion people.
His ghost lives in a glass coffin
In a freezer
And occasionally goes on display.
It doesn’t matter that he gave the orders
That cost thirty million people their lives.

The White Boned Demon gets the credit.

 

Tzu-Hsi, the last Chinese Empress,
Is considered a sexual deviant,
Who murdered her way
To the Dragon throne.

They say she murdered her son.

She was the female Stalin and Hitler of China.
This is far from reality,
But it is the truth
Because it is always momma’s fault.

 

When the Emperor spent too much time
With one concubine
And didn’t attend to his duties,
It was the women
Who were beheaded,
Or hung with a silk rope,
Or dropped down a well
Or had arms and legs removed
To spend years
Living in a vase,
Drooling on the rim,
As a reminder that it was momma’s fault
When the Emperor wasn’t doing his job.

 

So, when my daughter can’t make proper moves in ballet,
It is momma’s fault.
After all it was momma
Who was forced to work
In the pesticide and fungicide soaked rice paddies
In a labor camp
During the Cultural Revolution.
 

Author's Note

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Reviews

[Gandré]

dictatorships are always traumatic times and there is nothing else than the instinct to survive...That's why I abhore those societies.. I somehow don't like masses. I love individuum for then it is vulnerable, perhaps I cannot deal with this mass of persons for I am asked to act actually against my ethic principles, to me it matters. your wife must be a wonderful lady, so much love in heart....I sense how you write..this was very difficult time, I have read and heard about it... to survive this ...I recently wrote that it is a wonder to be a surviver at all! That all our ancestors survived, this is amazing! However, but of course is woman to blame, even Adam was trapped between Eve's legs so she was to blame , that's it. This went iwth centuries and unfortunately, this humanity didn't learn. They are still gready, still on ego trip, still it is all about power and few oligarchs play ping pong iwth us...people don't (want) to see how they are manipulated in every minute. It is important to let others to know. I thank you you for your spojen word poem. Very insightful and enriching. I am sure your daugher will be a grazile female, for aim must not neccessarily be to become a prima-ballerina but perhaps an airy, wonderful loving dancing being. I am sure I will be back to read more.I like this cultural environment, all what I do not know.

[TL Boehm]

wow. this is deep and so unusual for the cafe, there are only a handful of writers here who are both awake and articulate enough to write beyond their own emotional bubbles and scribe something about the world at large. this poem is profound and gut wrenching in its content. Well done. Well done.