the sun and her flowers

This chapter extends the subject matter beyond the speaker’s life and difficulties by focusing mainly on immigrants generally and the speaker’s mother specifically. The speaker remembers the wise advice that her mother gave her about how best to live and describes how difficult it was for her mother to leave India; she still misses her home country. Several poems look back at her mother’s life before the speaker was born. One poem recalls that her mother’s brother died one year before her wedding, and she was still in mourning on her wedding day. The speaker then comments on the plight of immigrants and the prevalence of chaos in the world. Migrants are packed together on a boat and fear that the boat will capsize. Refugees flee war, racist police kill people, babies are abandoned. Her empathy lies with those who suffer, especially women.

The speaker then returns to thoughts of her mother and makes a list of the advice she would have given her on her wedding day. She describes the harshness of her parents’ lives in their new country and wishes she had asked them more about their lives in India. For herself, she is proud of the fact that she speaks English with an accent since that reflects her origins.