Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today is Thursday, August 27th.

Today's poem is by an Asian-American poet named Marilyn Chin. Marilyn Chin is the 2020 winner of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

She was born in Hong Kong.

She grew up in Portland, Oregon.

She studied Chinese literature at the University of Massachusetts,

and she achieved a Masters of Fine Arts

from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop.

Marilyn Chin is a noted anthropologist,

translator, and educator, as well as a poet and novelist.

Her latest collection of poetry, you know, among many, but this is the latest, was published in

2018, and it is a collection of new and selected poems called A Portrait of the Self as Nation. And that's where this poem

from today comes from. The poem I'm going to read for you today is called Turtle Soup,

and this is how it goes. You go home one evening tired from work, and your mother boils you

turtle soup. Twelve hours hunched over the hearth.

Who knows what else is in that cauldron? You say, ma, you've poached the symbol of long life.

That turtle lived four thousand years, swam the way, up the yellow, over the Yanksy, witnessed the bronze

age, the high tang, grazed on splendid

sericulture. So she boils the life out of him. All our ancestors have been fools. Remember Uncle

Wu who rode 10,000 miles to kill a famous man chew and ended up with his head on a pole?

Eat child, its liver will make you strong.

Sometimes you're the life, sometimes the sacrifice.

Her sobbing is inconsolable.

...