A Journeying Day: Canto II. Identity.

Once I posed a moronic question
to my mother, staring through
her car window. 'Mum if I was born in
the province of Hunan, would I have
looked the way I look now?

Why do you ask? The answer
is definitive:
- Yes of course you will!
- Your blood is Oriental,
- Same as your skin,
- Oblique eyes and
- Lowered nose.

In a rural playground I recount the
brash playfulness of a piggyback fight
only to renter a history class,
casting my nimble finger through
the lines of a past I could not
claim as mine.

Bumbling home on Saxon pavings
that lined the Purbecks. Doubts surfaced
in their three's.
I. Another life led;
II. Another culture assumed;
III. A parallel that cannot be felt.

In odd moments, Lux Externa;
a sun illuminating a silhouette
that converses with the Kimonoed departed:

They never figure in my thought'¦

The forth draw of a mahogany desk I prise open,
looking at yellowed people etched
in a monotone photo. Their terracotta faces
frozen by the Gobi winds: They can only be
returning my curiosity.

They, my fellow bloods smile with
cheek strained smiles:
the
generations
of
brethren
line
back to back.

And for a moment I happened to have left
my life behind and in my mindless hours,
had drifted away; taken whole to the land
where a bloodline had placed the flesh of
a Sino upon those plain bones.

I could never bring up into consciousness:
the hands of ancestors I held
or the prefectures I once walked through.

And if I look around there was no
reminiscence of an English cloud that clad
the skies on a tired night.

So many times I have renounced them'¦
And yet they remind me when I unfurl
the curtains, the way Hunan rain lightly
showers in the early Springtime.

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