Having to Prove What You Know is True

Annabella Pitkin

I cherish my child’s cheek,

glitter of her eyelash, that wise voice.

She says, Poor Eve, always a mother, never a daughter. She says, I heard it on TikTok.

What I know is true: I cherish my mother, in her brown hospital bed, unmoored in time.

She says, it’s a garden party in here. I’m thinking of a steamboat. My bed will be rocking in the waves.

She says, welcome back to these shores.

You were so far away, in that other country of yours.

I know you cherish your mother. You shelter her with your body.

How can you measure the worth of a life? 

In a tent

In a burning room

In a house of dust

In a famished season.

Waiting for the young leaves of spring.

I think about my father, young and black haired, in a dining room with red walls.

He irons out the punchline of that old diasporic joke.

He says: Who is this good for? He says, I refuse.

He directed his rage into other things.

You already know it’s true:

It takes a long, long time to make a person.

Annabella Pitkin is a scholar of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist literature, culture, and intellectual history. She is Associate Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Lehigh University. Her book Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint (University of Chicago Press, 2022) explores themes of non-attachment, devotion, and memory in the life and work of the Himalayan poet-meditator Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen.