I dream I am a bowl of chillies
      --long red chillies, long-picked,
     skins cracking, flesh softening-- red chillies in a bowl of
speckled coconut wood, the Indonesian bowl my daughter brought me.
A mother makes a daughter, but A daughter makes a mother too. And as a
country shapes my daughter, she brings patterns to her girls, carrying
the mother-fires through.
I can turn myself into sambal
, a piquant comment to the daily rice, a recipe to be remembered and
followed, like your mother did.
You start, with a bowl of chillies: They speak the warmth hidden in your
wintry ways.