Is Japan, this new world, another mirror?
Because I am away from the country
where only the old and the impoverished cattle share my pain?
My people’s eyes telling my sister
she was a ten-rupee whore, a failed mother?
Perhaps the knowledge of seeing myself as I really am
would be a privilege, now that I am here.
In the peacock’s blue and emerald feathered brocade
are the pulsing eyes of thousands of discontented workers.
In the luminous look of the cowherd god idol
lurks the dead gaze of Gandhi.
Hidden in the shadows of ruined temples lifelong
I waited for the last hour of my servitude.
To build a scene from secret harmonies,
not write a history of attitudes.
But all I have learned is to play my memories
on the instrument of my life,
as I sit with Hiromi or Hisami or Masako
startled with mysteries that seemed to wait
on a world beyond my own.
Like this, for instance,
so simple in Japan, without a need to understand,
the fact that when I told the truth in my land
it always hurt my mother more than pretending did.
Pain that we have learnt to take care of,
but not the deceit, bare and sunburned,
measure of the spilled blood of the wounded sun.
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