moon song

there’s a Chinese concept

to sǎng yuè

admire the moon

celestial contemplation above

my daughter sings 

songs of twinkling stars

as I did when I was her age

in both Chinese and English 

star, xīng

xīng can mean both star and heart

my mother taught me 

evenings, she would recite 

a classical poem of the moon

and the longing for home 

gū xiāng, hometown

my child is named in the Spanish 

of our neighborhood

Luna, moon

Luna bears her Filipino father’s surname

her mother’s family name in Chinese

Chinese names don’t change

after marriage

I hyphenated my name 

connecting past (father-man) 

and future (husband-man)

my daughter counts on her fingers

one, two, three

yī, èr, sān 

uno, dos, tres

isa, duha, tatlo

Bisaya-Ilongo, father tongue

Mandarin, mother tongue

placing words in her mouth

tongue-tie her to half-forgotten cultures

long-lost hometowns

jiā, home, family

written with a roof over 

the head of a pig

a pig turns a house to a home

to be multilingual is to process existence 

in multiple universes, states of being

quantum superposition of self

to hear a word’s simultaneous

echoes and history

translations and homophones

mama, my daughter says

in every language she knows

to intuit connotations

define the untranslatable

understand a simple word in one language

can be a curse in another

as being biological female is a fact

a curse or blessing in context

marking my life in months

xuě, blood

xuě, snow

snow-covered land, moon-gleaming

in that classic mother-poem

a cycle of new to full, dark to bright

and back again

as when I talk to my mother

Chinese to English and back 

a hundred transitions 

in a single conversation

my mother’s ancestors were farmers

dependent on the lunar cycles

I wonder if she remembers them 

when she sǎng yuè

at the same moon that shone for her mother, 

for her daughters,

for my daughter, 

harvest-moon-born

who sees the moon and thinks of herself