All That Remains

"All That Remains" examines generational trauma through the often-overlooked perspective of a predecessor—my mother—as she visits her parents' graves. While discussions of generational trauma typically focus on how younger generations inherit pain, this poem reverses the viewpoint to highlight the origin of these wounds. I've created a raw, intimate vignette where she confronts not just loss but also the suffering she inherited and subsequently passed down to me.
The poem's cyclical structure—beginning and ending with "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, yet everything istransformed"—reflects how pain is neither created nor destroyed but passed from one generation to the next. My poem itself demonstrates transformation, taking readers on an emotional journey but returning them to where they started. Though readers end with the same words (Antoine Lavoisier's law of conservation of mass), their understanding has been transformed by everything experienced in between—they experience firsthand the principle being described. As a narrator observing my mother, I create a point of view highlighting the intersection of past, present, and future, forming a crux like the "resonant rosary, reverberating in air." The poem functions as commentary on grief and connections my mother lost with her parents even before they passed. Their absence carried its own presence and weight, asserting the power of what remained unspoken—a force continuing to exert influence across generations.
The visceral imagery of my mother's hands "claw[ing] the earth" and her desperate search among "slick slate-stones" speaks to a fundamental truth: before looking skyward, we must examine what lies beneath. I portray her recoiling from larvae that "embody the filth within" and her belief that her "blood is blighted" as she excavates the past, revealing how trauma becomes deeply internalized through introspection. When she "scalps chunks of meadow in fistfuls," she literally and metaphorically unearths her roots while uncovering her parents' headstones. As lineages become buried beneath dirt and time, my poem suggests that understanding necessitates this archaeological process of recovery—despite the strain involved. This excavation reflects Maya Angelou's insight: "If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going." My mother's journey demonstrates this as she searches for meaning among fragments of her past.
My poem shows her gaze eventually turning "up past the sky" while still confronting what remains below, exemplifying how aspiration cannot exist without acknowledging one’s origins. The poem's juxtaposition of concrete imagery and metaphorical language creates a complete arc from depressive desperation to potential transcendence. In writing this poem, I, too, "dig" up the past by reflecting on her experiences and how they've affected mine.
Furthermore, the ravens in my poem create layered symbolism enriching this exploration. In Chinese folklore, ravens paradoxically represent both filial piety (through "Wu Ya Fan Mu,"烏鴉反哺 where ravens feed elderly parents) and harbingers of death—mirroring my mother's complex emotions. As creatures traversing between worlds, they parallel my mother's liminal state as she confronts what's buried (her parents and her past) and what remains above ground (her present self and her enduring emotions). Their black feathers against the "silver sky" represent the contrast between darkness and transcendence, reflecting the poem's central tensions. Their presence as "sentinels" observing her grief parallels how I behold her pain, creating layered observation—emphasizing how pains experienced and witnessed across generations. The poem ultimately suggests transformation occurs through direct confrontation of our past—converting inherited trauma from an unconscious deterministic force into conscious material for growth. "All That Remains" is not merely an elegy for what was lost, but a declaration of agency over how these ancestral experiences shape me identity as a first-generation student. My poem affirms that while we cannot change our heritage, we can transform how we carry it forward