By A Jessie Michael
Be Longing
Like waves rolling to and fro
I land on distant shores,
Longing for better
Stretching for more.
.
Bird and beast speak
But in one voice;
Longing to belong
I speak in alien noise
.
The soul I sold
For freedom and fame
Roams longing in a limbo
That has no name
Now I look to
The abandoned shore,
The tongue longs to caress
Forgotten lore
.
My battered soul yearns
For the lost soulmate,
The waves of longing
Will not abate
.
Will I,
Wanderer forever,
Forever be longing
For a belonging?
.
Song of the Broken Migrant
I cross the ocean
Shimmering sea like shattered glass
The water fractures, breaks and blends
I see my contorted face.
.
On land my self- mirror finally breaks
I see fractured reflections Pieces of myself.
I am broken and cannot stitch myself together.
I am forever changed into an unrecognizable me.
.
A.Jessie Michael is a retired Associate Professor of English from Malaysia and a writer of short stories and poems. She has written winning short stories for local magazines and newspaper competitions and received honourable mentions in the AsiaWeek Short Story Competitions. She has worked with writers’ groups in Melbourne, Australia and Suzhou, China. Her stories have also appeared in The Gombak Review, 22 Asian Short Stories (2015), Bitter Root Sweet Fruit and recently three articles in Kitaab (2019) and a poem and Short story in Borderless (2020) She has previously published an anthology of short stories Snapshots, with two other writers and most recently her own anthology The Madman and Other Stories (2016).
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