What She Tried to Teach Me

"Death is inevitable,"
I scoffed when mom told me,
"Everything is impermanent,"
I didn't know how soon she'd leave.

Every single day, I cried,
Wishing I could remember
The way she held me in her arms
When we came here together.

When I found her head alone,
Floating there in the rice field,
Her eyes looked so empty,
And my heart didn't heal.

My guilt is not grief,
I had learned that day,
So I clutched my heavy heart,
And turned to walk away.

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+Author's Note

My mom always told me a Khmer folktale about a girl who finds her long-deceased mother's head floating in the rice fields. This poem combines that folktale with the Buddhist teachings I never tried hard enough to learn, set within a level (that I could not write due to personal circumstances), where simply surviving takes everything, leaving no room to understand why.