Quiet Night Think by Gillian Sze

Author:Gillian Sze
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2022-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Part of sitting inside the moon is not reading. My grandmother laughed when I asked why. The answer was obvious: girls didn’t learn to read back then. Nowadays, it is discouraged to read because a new mother has to protect her eyes. I had to make sure not to strain a single part of my body. It was an adjustment not to be able to read. It had been something I had done every day of my life since I could remember. The written word was prohibited. I had to learn to be in a world with my son with only the words I already had, and the new language I had to learn.

Writing was one of the first things to leave me. For a long time, even after I was done sitting in the moon, this part of me stayed quiet, returning only surprisingly and sporadically. A villanelle when my son was three months old. Another poem a few months later. I wrote at a rate of a poem per season, the tasks of writing and mothering always in conflict: one demanding time, space, and silence, the other impossibly stingy with all of those. The writing will come back, a friend, who was also both a mother and a poet, assured me. Life is large, another said.

But I found a limit to words in that first month. It was as solid as the door my mother would forbid me from opening, or the windows that stayed shut. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.12 The limits of my infant mean the limits of my world.

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