Cooking and Healing

Going through my poetry archives, I rediscovered two related poems about mothering that complement each other. The first one, “My Mother Cooks Pancit”, is about my mother’s ability to heal through cooking, how she helped my father conquer cancer by cooking pancit, a traditional Filipino noodle dish. The second poem, “Arroz Caldo”, is about me cooking a vegetarian version of another Filipino dish, arroz caldo, for my daughter when she was sick. Written at different times in my life, they reveal how my family and my past have influenced my present; they also express my reverence for cooking as an activity that is rich with meaning and history, as an essential element in my life as a mother, and a great comfort in a world of difficulty and uncertainty.


My Mother Cooks Pancit

She crushes cloves of garlic in a marble mortar
as if they were the cells spreading in my father’s throat.

Flame pulses beneath the wok.
She pours in oil, tests with a few pellets of her sweat.

Hot as his fever, the yellow liquid crackles, spits.
She stirs in roots, carrots, string beans and shrimp.

Green and orange scents color father’s frailness
(drain full of hair, days of chemo).

With kalamansi juice, patis, salt,
she seasons our sorrows, awakens our palates.

Rice noodles seeped in wooden bowl of jasmine water,
translucent, soft, drained then mixed in.

Her tenderness rises into the light,
thin white threads steaming into lace.

Kaen na she calls.

Stairs creak, slippers shuffle. We sit around the table,
eat to the hymn of silver forks and porcelain bowls.

Each forkful a surge of flavor:
my mother’s faithful hands.


Arroz Caldo

In my left arm, I am holding a hundred degree,
coughing child, head leaning against my shoulder.
In my right hand, steel knife
roughly cuts organic garlic, onion, and ginger.
Pieces scatter on the ground.

I am making my version of arroz caldo,
the rice soup my mother used to make
when we were fevered and ill:
golden broth from achuete, lumpy rice,
bite size pieces of tripe and chicken,
scallions, browned garlic, and lemon juice for garnish.

Now I am the mother in the kitchen.
Oil and salt, I sizzle the roots in wok.
I stir with wooden spoon,
adjust the child on my hip.
Add short grain brown rice,
firm tofu broken up with my right hand,
quarts of water and un-chicken bouillon cubes.

Cover. Simmer for an hour.

***

While we wait to eat,
sit in recliner in the living room,
Jazzy leaning against my torso
still in the arc of my left arm,
our legs under a black, tasseled Navajo blanket.

On the screen, two fish inside the cavernous mouth of the whale
hang on the cliff of its tongue:
-It’s time to let go
-How do you know something bad isn’t going to happen?
With trust and instinct, they let fall
into quaking pit, not knowing
if they will be food or free.

Outside the pot, the hallway, the windows, this chair,
inside our shifting bodies, there will be times
when we are swallowed. For now,
the scent and softening of simmering rice
and the certainty of this stew.