Second Language Learning and Identity: Cracking Metaphors in Ideo ...

A Poetic Prelude

A Transmuting Sea Star

God released one star from the sky

Now, an aged sea star residing in the graveyard of the ocean

Listening to the cadence of the waves, washing on and off the shore

Soft, but violent

Here, beauty changes from moment to moment

I sing a song of goldensilence, Haiku

Vast emptiness, vast fullness

Drinking Japanese, both bitter and sweet

Breathing English, both polluted and pristine

Dancing without legs

With ghosts, with the beams of Sun that pierce the depths of the sea

To the floor of the mutable ocean desert

Unfamiliar difference; tears so potent they drive me to laugh

Dreaming of the sky; in which I shone before I was born

But I no longer share the panorama of the Moon

While it looks down, sailing over the clouds