Love Is Not Enough - Leong Liew Geok

Not that I don’t want to be
A loving wife, a good mother.
Not that I can’t sacrifice
Like all women before or after.
Not that I don’t love.
Not that I can’t cook.
Not that I won’t please.
Not that I shan’t care.

Love is not enough

At home, husband
And children lodge,
Biting, munching, gnawing
Bone, bloody and bare.

Dream-monsters trip me
At work, smirking of home;
Past midnight, in a kitchen
Emptied of sound and smell,
Tangled in knots,
I see him upstairs,
Asleep, alone.

Must bearer-wearers always ache?

Hard and white, I grate
Like half-cooked rice.

Joanne Leow - Watching My Grandmother Eat Fish

like a cat

her once slim fingers
tear each morsel off
the bones
deliberately

Crouched, intent
between mouthfuls of rice
she informs me
that I used to snap off their tails
and with great care remove their skins
declaring the flesh boring

And I think how I know no other
like her really
living in her house of strangers
in a race where blood is most prized.

Maya Angelou - I know why the caged bird sings

A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
And dares to claim the sky.

But a BIRD that stalks down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
Of things unknown but longed for still
And his tune is heard on the distant hill for
The caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through
The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright
Lawn and he names the sky his own.

But a caged BIRD stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with
A fearful trill of things unknown
But longed for still and his
Tune is heard on the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.

James Aldrich - A Death-Bed

Her suffering ended with the day;
  Yet lived she at its close,
And breathed the long, long night away,
  In statue-like repose.

But when the sun, in all his state,
  Illumed the eastern skies,
She passed through glory’s morning-gate,
  And walked in Paradise!

Aubrey Thomas De Vere - Sad is our youth, for it is ever going

Sad is our youth, for it is ever going, 

Crumbling away beneath our very feet; 

Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing 

In current unperceived, because so fleet; 

Sad are our hopes, for they were sweet in sowing,— 

But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat; 

Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing, 

And still, O, still their dying breath is sweet;

And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us 

Of that which made our childhood sweeter still; 

And sweet is middle life, for it hath left us 

A nearer good to cure an older ill; 

And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them, 

Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them!