Mango Poem
Regie Cabico
Mother fetches the fruit from the mango behind closed bamboo.
Rips its paper-leather cover during midday recess,
before English class, describes their dance
peaches plums cantaloupes before my first-world
eyes. When the sun blazed on the dust,
Where the mangos were first planted, mother,
an infant, hid under gravel
swaddled by Lola, my grandmother,
after my mother’s aunt and uncle
were tied to the trunk
and stabbed by the Japanese. Mother and daughter living off
fallen mangos, the pits planted in darkness,
before I was born.
We left the Philippines
for California dodging
U.S. Customs with the forbidden fruit,
thinking who’d deprive mother of her mangos.
Head down, my father denies that we have perishable
foods, waving passports in the still air,
motioning for us
to proceed towards the terminal.
Behind a long line of travelers,
my sisters surround mother
like shoji screens as she hides the newspaper-covered
fruit between her legs. Mangos sleeping
in the hammock of her skirt, a brilliant batik
billowing from the motion
of airline caddies pushing suitcases
on metal carts.
We walk around mother
forming a crucifix where she was center.
On the plane as we cross time zones, mom unwraps
her ripe mangos, the ones from the tree Lola planted
before she gave birth to my mother,
the daughter that left home to be a nurse
in the States,
who’d marry a Filipino navy man
and have three children of her own. Mother eating
the fruit whose juices rain
over deserts and cornfields.
Guide Questions:
1. Where does the narrator’s family live at the start of the poem?
2. Why did the narrator’s family left their place?
3. What specific time or era do you think this story happened?
4. Why the story is entitled Mango?
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Answer: please answer
Explanation: