Bamboo Wind

I am in a vast black sea, the spaces reach in front of me

As far as I could ever see, as far again behind.

And each new world I land upon, with seas and hills and storm and dawn,

Can never fill me when I'm gone or overwhelm my mind.

But I am haunted by a bamboo wind

The clatter of the bones of our misbegotten earth

The wail of a memory of how our fears

Destroyed the precious cradle of our birth.

Bamboo glades within my head are spectres of the lands we fled

With all our second chances dead we could not hope to stay

Bamboo dances in my night, hides the stars that watch my flight

It moans and rattles of the blight that made us run away.

But I am haunted by a bamboo wind

The clatter of the bones of our misbegotten earth

The wail of a memory of how our fears

Destroyed the precious cradle of our birth.

Bamboo forest, dead or lost, overlaps these points of frost

Knowing what these stars have cost I feel a bleak despair

Ancestors revile our name, curse the wombs from which we came

Dispossessed and drowned in shame, with no home anywhere.

And I am haunted by a bamboo wind

The clatter and the moaning of a world we see no more

The rustle of the ghost of leaves in dappled sun

The ruined song of every shattered shore.