Early in the Morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
Notes
Where Rainer Maria Rilke paced the empty avenues of a decaying autumn, preparing the solitary consciousness for the long chill of non-being, Li-Young Lee steps into the soft, quiet light of a domestic interior to watch his mother unpin and comb her heavy black hair beneath his father’s steady, devotional gaze. The daily ritual strips away the alienation of temporal passage, demonstrating how habitual repetition functions not as mechanical entrapment, but as an embodied symbolic sanctuary where fragile human affection continually repairs the subtle ruptures inflicted by the historical world outside. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the tender cadence of domestic routine, reminding us that repetition is also an act of quiet preservation, allowing the past to return each morning not as a haunting ghost, but as a deliberate rhythm of care. #poetry #LiYoungLee #echo #september #family
Copyright © 1986 Li-Young Lee, whose most recent book of poetry is “Book of My Nights,” BOA Editions, Ltd., 2001.