Poems by Rose

Auntie Trudis, Sit First
 
Forgive the child who thought you worked for us, 
who saw your hands and named you by their use— 
the sweeping, serving, scrubbing after supper, 
and never thought to ask what you would choose. 
 
They told me, “She is family.” I remember 
how strangely that word stumbled in my head. 
For family rested, laughing at the table, 
while you were standing, serving us instead. 
 
You waited ’til each want had found an answer, 
’til every plate was passed, each glass was filled. 
You moved in small and silent circles, Auntie, 
as though your own desires had all been stilled. 
 
You were the last to sit. I see it clearly— 
soft steps, shy smile, sorrow in your eyes. 
You learned to make yourself so small and silent, 
as though even longing should apologize. 
 
And then there was that bell. God, how I hate it— 
that little handheld summons, sharp and slight. 
They did not even need to call you, Auntie; 
one ring, and you appeared within their sight. 
 
A ring—and you came walking from the kitchen. 
A ring—and once again you rose to stand. 
As though a piece of metal had more power 
than your own name, your rest, your own command. 
 
And once that little bell broke into silence. 
I like to think an angel broke the thing— 
that Heaven heard how they had summoned you 
and reached straight down to stop that goddamned ring. 
 
Perhaps some angel whispered, She has a name. 
Perhaps, for once, the house was forced to still. 
Perhaps that broken bell was Heaven’s mercy— 
a small rebellion made on your behalf. 
 
But they replaced it. 
Bought another. 
And God, I think that somehow hurts me more: 
even when mercy broke the thing that called you, 
they brought another summons through the door. 
 
Years later, when we crossed the sea returning, 
the years had changed us—yet you served there still. 
The world had widened out for everybody; 
for you, the same four walls, the same old will. 
 
That Sunday, everyone was dressed for worship, 
shoes shining, Sunday voices through the hall. 
I asked if you could come with us to church. 
He said no. 
As though you had no place at all. 
 
I was the last to leave. And there I saw you— 
alone upon the staircase in the dim. 
You cried so softly even grief seemed careful 
not to become another need for him. 
 
Auntie, I still see you on those stairs. 
That image has outlived the house, the years: 
everyone leaving there to pray for mercy 
while mercy sat behind them shedding tears. 
 
They went to kneel before a kneeling Savior— 
the Christ who washed another person’s feet. 
And left behind the woman who had served them 
to weep alone upon a shadowed seat. 
 
If Christ was anywhere that Sunday evening, 
I cannot think He waited in their pew. 
I think He sat beside you on that staircase 
and let the others go without you two. 
 
You told me once that men had wished to marry you, 
that love had tried to lead you somewhere new. 
But someone else decided you should stay there, 
as though your life were his to give or refuse. 
 
What right had any man to close that doorway? 
What right to tell your heart where it could go? 
They kept your hands, your labor, and your lifetime, 
then paid you—as though payment made it so. 
 
You raised their children, then you raised their children, 
then children born from children you had known. 
Your hands held up the weight of generations 
while you were scarcely handed back your own. 
 
From cradle into cradle, need to needing, 
from house to house, from hunger into care, 
we learned that you would always come when called for 
and rarely wondered what it cost you there. 
 
You made yourself so small that we grew larger. 
You bent so every branch could find the sun. 
Like roots beneath a tree that no one praises, 
you fed the fruit and asked to harvest none. 
 
They mistook meekness for a lack of power, 
your tenderness for something they could spend. 
But gentleness was never your surrender, 
and kindness never meant that you should bend. 
 
You had a thousand reasons to grow hardened, 
yet hardness never settled in your face. 
I knew you first through gentle, grieving eyes 
and that shy smile that somehow still held grace. 
 
That is the saint I carry when I name you— 
not halo, hymn, or statue dressed in gold, 
but someone given every cause for cruelty 
who somehow still chose kindness to uphold. 
 
I wish I’d known enough to see you sooner— 
the woman underneath the work and wear. 
I wish I’d pulled your chair out at the table 
and said, “Sit down. We’ll serve you. Leave it there.” 
 
I wish I could return to that dark Sunday 
and find you halfway up those shadowed stairs. 
I would not follow everyone to worship. 
I’d sit beside you in the darkness there. 
 
I’d say, “Let them go pray without us, Auntie. 
If God is good, then God already knows:
no hymn beneath a chapel roof is holier 
than staying with the one whom others chose 
to leave alone.” 
 
And I would tell you what I understand now: 
the shame was never yours to bear or hide. 
There was no smallness in the way you loved us. 
The smallness lived in those who stood beside 
 
your life and never asked what life you wanted, 
who loved your giving more than they loved you. 
They called you family while keeping you in service. 
A child could see those words could not be true. 
 
So hear me now, wherever you are resting: 
I see the woman childhood failed to see. 
Not hands beside a sink. Not someone summoned. 
Not what you gave to us— 
but who you were to me. 
 
And if I carry any quiet kindness, 
if tenderness still lives beneath my skin, 
if I know humble never means unworthy, 
then, Auntie, you are where that truth begins. 
 
I hope that Heaven has no bells to call you. 
No dishes wait. No footsteps seek you still. 
I hope God speaks your name and asks you softly, 
What do you want? 
And waits to hear your will. 
 
I hope a chair is waiting at His table— 
not last, not earned, not granted out of guilt. 
A place no one can ring you from, my Auntie, 
a rest no other hands can make you yield. 
 
You spent your whole life rising when they called you. 
You spent your whole life waiting for your turn. 
They made you last.
 
But you believed the promise: 
the last shall be the first. 
 
So sit, Auntie. 
 
Let us stand. 
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Family Reunion
 
When I have tried to date an Asian man,
the dead and living gather.
 
A cousin rises in the cheek,
an uncle lingers in the smile,
my father flickers through the eyes
and stays there for a while.
 
Sometimes blood remembers further—
 
a grandfather before the gray,
his brothers before the years grew old,
sepia faces slipping free of frames,
returning young from photographs I hold.
 
My family has never lacked for beauty.
 
There are handsome men among the branches,
one beautiful enough to model,
to make a living beneath strangers’ glances,
while blood keeps watch beneath it all.
 
For blood is a brutal chaperone.
 
Once recognition takes its seat,
desire rises, gathers its coat;
no candlelight can make kin strange,
no spark survives inside the throat.
 
Even the man between two bloodlines,
white woven through his Asian side,
came carrying generations of money
and every comfort wealth could provide.
 
He told me
I could be set for life.
 
I studied his face,
then an old photograph—
 
and there was my uncle
looking back.
 
I showed him.
 
Because wealth may open every door,
may buy the view, the room, the space—
but money cannot loosen blood from bone
or make me unknow a familiar face.
 
So I learned to look beyond the table,
past branches bending near,
toward faces untouched by family,
faces memory cannot mirror.
 
And rarely,
one appears—
 
no cousin carved into the cheekbone,
no uncle waiting in the grin,
no father flickering through the eyes,
no grandfather gathering beneath the skin.
 
At last,
a stranger.
 
At last,
a face my blood has never claimed.
 
And he passes without seeing me.
 
So the reunion keeps its cruel symmetry:
 
the men who look my way
arrive already named,
 
and the men I might have wanted
leave
before learning mine.




 
In Their Hands
 
The hardening of the heart began in childhood, 
not all at once, but grain by grain— 
a little limestone learning pressure, 
a little softness schooled by pain. 
 
First came the yelling through the walls, 
then truth turned crooked in their mouths, 
then fingers pinched until they bloodied, 
then palms, then fists, then darker bouts. 
 
Black became blue. 
Blue yellowed underneath the skin. 
And every bruise became a mineral 
the body buried deeper in. 
 
Then abandonment— 
the oldest quarrying of all: 
to learn the hands that built your shelter 
could be the hands that let you fall. 
 
The pressure followed into adolescence. 
Your first no from the one you adored. 
Your first goodbye. 
Your first breakup. 
Your first slammed door. 
 
Then the first one who betrayed you, 
sweet with speech and skilled in lies; 
another little fault line forming, 
another color underneath disguise. 
 
Then came the man with a honeyed glass, 
but gunpowder and whiskey filled the pour— 
they seeped into the marble’s fractures 
and stained what pressure had cracked before. 
 
And still the heart absorbed it— 
heat upon hurt, 
pressure upon pain, 
impurities slipping through each fracture, 
settling slowly into every vein. 
 
Grief became graphite. 
Anger became iron. 
Fear became fault lines 
where tenderness had been. 
 
Until one day 
what once was flesh had finished changing: 
cold, 
veined, 
beautiful perhaps, 
but no longer beating. 
 
Marble. 
 
It was cut from the mountain 
and carried away with heavier stone, 
then shelved for years in a dusty yard— 
hard among hard things, alone. 
 
Buyers passed. 
Some glanced and kept walking. 
Some saw only scars in the slab. 
Some wanted cleaner coloring, 
straighter veins, 
something easier to have. 
 
No one stayed long enough 
to wonder what slept beneath the gray— 
the buried bronze, 
the ghosted green, 
the colors dust had dulled away. 
 
Until one day a sculptor 
 
stopped. 
 
He stood before it silently, 
studying every scar and seam, 
as though the fractures were not failures 
but maps of something still unseen. 
 
Then from his hand 
he doused it with water— 
clear as an eternal spring— 
and watched the sleeping stone grow darker, 
watched hidden colors rise within. 
 
The dust ran down. 
The veins rose vivid. 
Gold glimmered underneath the gray. 
What others called impurity 
became the reason he would stay. 
 
He did not bargain down its value. 
He did not ask what made it scarred. 
He paid its worth, 
bore its weight, 
and carried it home with care. 
 
Inside his studio, 
he did not lift the chisel first. 
 
He studied.
Sketched. 
Marked. 
Measured. 
Then measured once again. 
 
A practiced hand knows marble
remembers everywhere it strained; 
one careless strike along a fracture 
can split what pressure has sustained. 
 
So he learned each fault line faithfully, 
where hammer might meet stone, 
where force could free what waited there, 
and where restraint alone. 
 
Chisel. 
Pause. 
Chisel. 
Listen. 
 
Dust fell softly to the floor. 
Not every blow was meant to break it. 
Some were meant to free what stone had stored. 
 
Then came the polishing. 
 
Slow circles. 
Soft cloth. 
Steady hands. 
Again. 
Again. 
Again. 
 
He polished what the others passed 
until the buried colors shone, 
not sanding scars into surrender, 
not making wounded marble new. 
 
He only let the light fall differently 
across each darkened hue, 
until every vein became visible 
and every fracture carried through. 
 
And slowly, 
under patient hands, 
the stone began to shine— 
not white, 
not flawless, 
not untouched, 
but marked by pressure, heat, and time. 
 
The iron made the amber. 
The graphite made the gray. 
The fractures gave the mineral-rich water 
somewhere to make its way. 
 
What wounded it 
had altered it. 
What altered it 
had made it rare. 
And only someone willing to look closely 
would ever find the colors there. 
 
When the sculptor finally stepped away, 
he did not claim the work as his. 
He did not say, 
“I saved you.” 
He did not say, 
“I made you this.” 
 
He simply looked at what had always waited 
beneath the dust, beneath the years, 
beneath the heat and hammering, 
beneath the hardened layers of fear. 
 
And whispered, 
 
“I saw you.” 
 
Then somewhere deep beneath the marble, 
beneath each vein, beneath each scar, 
something stirred where stone had settled— 
faint, 
then fuller, 
then not so far. 
 
For the sculptor had not given it a heartbeat. 
That was never his to impart. 
 
He had only made it safe enough 
for stone to remember 
 
it was still 
a heart. 




 
Little Girl, Listen
 
Little girl, listen—
 
I know the black-and-blue beneath your sleeve,
the red crescent pressed where skin learned to grieve,
the knees made to carry what was never their blame,
the numbers that blurred whenever they called your name.
 
I know the wall you studied for hours,
as though somewhere beneath plaster and paint
there had to be a window they forgot to build,
some narrow opening where the air remained.
 
So when I tell you that you were never bad,
believe the woman who remembers what you had—
a childhood framed with shouting in the rafters,
shame worked deep into the grain,
where every crack in someone else’s foundation
was somehow given your name.
 
But little girl,
 
you were never the damage.
 
You were the child living inside it,
learning which floorboards complained beneath a foot,
which doors should never be opened,
how small a body could make itself
when nowhere in the house felt safe.
 
And one day, you will leave.
 
Old houses have a way of following people—
a splinter beneath the skin,
a hinge still crying in the wind.
 
There will even be men who resemble those rooms:
different curtains, fresh paint,
another name above the door,
yet something in the air will feel terribly known,
and you may mistake familiar for home.
 
Until you learn
that love should not require
reading weather from another person’s face,
measuring every word,
memorizing every escape.
 
Then slowly, little girl,
you will rebuild—
 
beam by beam with better wood,
window by window until morning can enter
without asking permission first.
 
And one day,
someone small will come running through them—
 
your daughter.
 
She will leave laughter loose in the hallway,
her shoes placed neatly beside the door,
because you will teach her to care for what shelters her
without teaching her to fear the shelter.
 
You will show her the beams beneath every rule,
why one wall bears weight
and another was only placed there
because someone older said it should be.
 
You will teach her to ask why
until the question becomes a window,
until she can look through it herself
and choose which door to take.
 
You will not teach her
that being older makes someone right.
 
You will teach her
how to see for herself.
 
And somewhere beneath every room that you mend,
another little girl will begin again—
the one who learned early to live on thin air,
who stayed in that house
long after everyone left her there.
 
You will raise them together:
 
one child beside you,
growing forward,
 
one child inside you,
finally growing free.
 
Little girl,
 
that second child will be me.
 
Because I will become the mother we needed—
the hands that guide without leaving bruises,
the voice that explains instead of commands,
the love that does not demand silence
before it gives affection.
 
I will become the roof when the weather turns wild,
the door that opens instead of locks,
the woman who kneels to the height of a child
and tells her what someone should have told you:
 
You are beautiful.
 
You are worthy.
 
You were never the stain,
never the reason the windows shook,
never the thunder,
never the rain.
 
So come out of that house, little girl.
 
Leave the shame where it fell.
 
There is another home waiting,
where questions are allowed through every doorway,
where a child can understand the rules she is given
instead of fearing the person who gave them.
 
I know because I built it—
 
for the girl laughing down the hall,
for the woman rebuilding these walls,
and for the child still standing
where the old house stood,
 
waiting for someone to come back for her.
 
Little girl, listen—
 
I came back.
 
I built this home
 
for her,
 
for me,
 
for you.