You could have grown
Towering skyscrapers by your foothills
And monumental landscapes
By your scenic riverbanks
But you insisted
On having terraced farms
And orchards of fruit trees
You could have bred
Smoldering genius, talented artists
Had the elitists built their cribs
On your patches of greens
Instead you have sown
Seeds of dream among
Farmers, laborers, poor ones
When I was young
The road that traversed you
Was a baked brown path
Sprinkled with crushed gravels
With time, patches of cement
Were plastered like band-aids
To cover your wound on which we thread
With that I expected
Stately homes and well-lit shops
To spring on your bosom overnight
Boomtown, in the making
But not yet soon
Not in the next ten years,
Nor in the next twenty
For I am twenty-two now
And on your highest hills
Where I once beheld
The majestic blue of
South China Sea
Remains the grazing cows
Generations of them
Came and passed by
The kites we once flew
On your blue sky
Are no longer the kites
That infest it on windy summers
They are the ghosts of our innocence
Ghosts of our dreams
And your ghost too
You could have haunted me
And forced me to return
But you care not for me
You have seen others forget you
You could use ingratitude
To wipe on your gaping wound
And sting it like a salt does
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem