Self-portrait

Dad was a slave. Never home even late at night.
Only old Gran was around, like a leek's roots,
    and a flowering jujube tree.
Pregnant Ma craved to eat just one green apricot --
Ma's black-nailed son, under an oil lamp in a mud wall.
Some say I look like her dad:
the same mop of hair, his big eyes.
In the Year of Revolt Grandad went to sea
    and never came back, the story goes.
What's raised me, then, these twenty-three years
is the power of the wind, for eight parts in ten.
The world's course has yielded only shame;
some have perceived a felon in my eyes,
others a fool in this mouth of mine,
yet I'm sure there's nothing I need regret.

Even on mornings when day dawned in splendour,
the poetic dew anointing my brow
has always been mingled with drops of blood;
I've come through life in sunshine and shadows
like a sick dog panting, its tongue hanging out.