Poem #5: Response to "The Youngest Daughter" by Cathy Song

Poem:

The sky has been dark

for many years.

My skin has become as damp

and pale as rice paper

and feels the way

mother’s used to before the drying sun   

parched it out there in the fields.

Lately, when I touch my eyelids,

my hands react as if

I had just touched something

hot enough to burn.

My skin, aspirin colored,   

tingles with migraine. Mother

has been massaging the left side of my face   

especially in the evenings   

when the pain flares up.

This morning

her breathing was graveled,

her voice gruff with affection   

when I wheeled her into the bath.   

She was in a good humor,

making jokes about her great breasts,   

floating in the milky water

like two walruses,

flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.   

I scrubbed them with a sour taste   

in my mouth, thinking:

six children and an old man

have sucked from these brown nipples.

I was almost tender

when I came to the blue bruises

that freckle her body,

places where she has been injecting insulin   

for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,

she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.

It seems it has always

been like this: the two of us

in this sunless room,

the splashing of the bathwater.

In the afternoons

when she has rested,

she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,   

garnished with a shred of gingered fish,

a slice of pickled turnip,

a token for my white body.   

We eat in the familiar silence.

She knows I am not to be trusted,   

even now planning my escape.   

As I toast to her health

with the tea she has poured,

a thousand cranes curtain the window,

fly up in a sudden breeze.

Response:

As soon I started reading this poem, the first idea that popped into my head was this idea of sickness and what comes with old age. The three theme topics that came into my mind were youth, growing old, and dependency. Through the details the author uses, it's easy to see that the mother is very sick and has been sick for many years, "I was almost tender when I came to the blue bruises that freckle her body, places where she has been injecting insulin for thirty years". The author also distributes a lot of imagery which helps us capture the setting of the entire poem and this also helps to tell us the tone and mood of the poem: sympathetic and almost relaxing and comforting. It's quite odd to note that the mood of the entire poem seems to be comforting because the mother is suffering through a sickness. However, when we look through the eyes of first person(the narrator), we don't actually know how the mother is feeling through all of this. Is she relaxed just like the daughter or is she discomforted by the idea that her daughter has to take care of her because she cannot take care of herself?

I noted that we, as readers, don't know where the other five other children went as the mother nursed six children total. However, we do know that the daughter taking care of the mother now is the youngest daughter, hence the title. By the end of the poem, the narrator mentions, "She knows I am not to be trusted, even now planning my escape". Maybe the youngest daughter was the only one not able to move on with her life yet because she was the only one left to take care of her mother. 

Overall, I feel as though the theme of this entire poem has to deal with the idea that the mother has turned out to be the "young one" because she is incapable of taking care of herself. The mother represents this dependency she has on her youngest daughter and it foreshadows her ultimate fate of death when her daughter has to "escape". When we put this into consideration, "The Youngest Daughter" represents the growth of a young adult preparing for adulthood whereas the mother represents what happens when a person grows old and their youth is taken from them.