A Final Place of Rest

Translated…

I’m Taking You Home, Over a Thousand Kilometers Away

On that Desolate Mountain

I’d Left There

Almost Seventy Years in Counting Already

Back Home, the Mountains Blew into the Valleys

The Clouds, Flew Over the Hilltops, My Parents

a Chinese-style painting found online…

Became a Stack of Bones, in that Unkept Grave Covered in Weeds

That Year, You’d Returned from Thousands of Kilometers Away

With a Stick of Incense, Three Items of Offering

Spent Up ALL the Money You’d Had on You

To, Fulfill Your Filial Piety Duties

Taking You Back Home, Past Those Thousands of Kilometers in Distance

It’s No Longer, as You’d, Remembered it to Be

Seventy Years Later, You are Also, Not as Your Hometown Remembered You to Be Either

You’d Wanted to Settle Down at Your Favorite Place

taking someone home for a “release”…not my photo…

Accompanying Your Own Parents, that Was from When I Was a Young Child and Heard

You Talked of Your Childhood Days Over and Over Again

But, I’d Heard You Whispered on

I Will Forever, Safeguard My Family Members

That that Island Over Thousands of Kilometers Out

Is the Place You’d Wanted to, Rest in

The Tears, Followed the Handful of Ashes

Carried Off by the Wind, in the Afternoons

The Dreams, Woke

On the Edge of Tears

So, this, is fulfilling the last wishes of one’s own dying parents, and because the parents didn’t get the chance to return back home one last time, the offspring is now, fulfilling the final wishes for her/his elders, and, it’s normal, to want to return to one’s own childhood homeland as we’re about to die.