Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Poetry 2018 | Page 87

But the water,
Unplumbed and bold and fathoming,
Doesn’t dent his aspirations.
He has stumbled onto new trails, a new way.
A new life, a new play.
New things, and new chinks,
New niggles and new giggles.
And sights he has never seen before –
The halls and hearths, steeples and spires,
Grand and gaping, majestic towers.
Like nothing he’s ever laid eyes on before,
College truly does open new doors.
Fresh friends, books and freedom:
A baptism by fire and wisdom.
And like a baby sea turtle,
He lumbers,
Past the driftwood the colour of umber,
For he is a lone tree,
Rooted in foreign headlands,
Being doused relentlessly by a sharp-tongued sea.
No more parents,
A dented mood,
Just the shrill choirs of his solitude.
Yes, college is a pronounced thing,
But it comes with its fair share of, well, everything.
Problems and plenty, diamonds and pennies…
Children want to leave home,
And he is no different.
Yet he realises, his parents were like the sun,
Rise and warm and streaming
His old friends like the moon’s eye,
Calm and grained and replenishing;
His sister like the flame tree’s shade,
His brother protective like an old bear’s cave.
Ten years later, he will remember
his journey to the West
with the tenderness of a flower’s patient mind,
but for both him –
and ten thousand miles away,
his parents –
each slow dusk was a hasty drawing down of blinds.