My Sister’s Heart

I was eavesdropping in our room 

when my mother told my eldest sister

that a stitch in time saved nine.

My sister asked, “nine of what?”

My mother said that if she fell in love early,

she would be on her way to getting married

before her bones shrivelled or her body broke.

I heard my sister's guffaw like the song of cicadas,

or the hum of the crow at the back of our garden.

The day wore darkness like a grey dress,

two slices of a tablet in ash and blood.

Even before my sister's laughter,

the oil bean in my mother’s farm burnt,

with a loud clap that murdered the owl.

It burst into a million yellow tongues, 

each of them dancing in the air, bursting the sky.

Two days later, my sister stood before my mother

and touched her chest with her two palms;

she said that she gathered a heartbreak.

My mother’s grand-motherhood evaporated

like day when night fell like a khaki sack. 

My sister said she fell in love with a man

who wielded a hammer in his right hand

and a sharp long knife in his left;

but her love was as uncontrollable as the sea,

surgical to the brain, magical to the senses;

she had nothing to fear from him

because her greater love was the miracle

to think the unthinkable and do the undoable,

a model of love conquers all things.

Even in her most inebriated moments,

she knew a heartbreak was inevitable,

but she didn't want to avoid it.

Heartbreak was for those who have loved.

My sister unburdened her body and dress,

revealing the jagged pieces of her broken heart,

but she shoved her shoulders up with grace

and smiled with the eloquence of the stars at night.

A weathered heart survives a weathered world.