Midwife
Sunday night in the living room
my grandmother reads The Chinese Times
with a cracked magnifying glass
and one lamp. She does this every Sunday
when my mother and the other children
are not around, and I lie on the couch,
quiet so as not to disturb her contemplation.
Today, she will think back to a time
when at eighteen, delicate,
useless for the village,
she is married off
to a country herb doctor.
In his village, she could not carry
a child in her arms and two buckets
of water from her shoulders,
did not know how to walk
through a rice field without slippers.
But she delivered children, house to house,
even after she had seen her brother-in-law
kneel on broken glass, and beaten
so brutally with a steel rod, that afterwards,
he hanged himself from an iron gate,
or even after she had heard the news
that two evenings before, during a curfew,
a Japanese soldier had shot
a pregnant woman
crawling across a wide dirt road
because he thought she was a pig.
The babies, hard births—
the urine, blood, and waste
so thick on sheets, she had to smoke
to keep from retching—
she delivered for a bunch of dried vegetables,
a bag of rice, even nothing.