Japan - a work in progress

So I have written a poem about Japan, although it is still a work in progress.....

Japan was freedom to me,

Not the natural freedom of an English pastoral past,

But an illuminated dream of the future,

A premonition of the space age.

It was all shiny surfaces,

Smooth and sudden,

And the bright reflections of lights,

In the water of wintry harbors,

Tall buildings draped in ornate neon,

A hive of busy pattern in garish colours,

A hub of life assaulting the eyes.

Japan was our dragon’s breath in the cold crisp dark air of night,

Freezing bones warmed with bowls of steaming soupy noodles,

Paving ways to our mouths with the wet flicks of eels’ tails.

There were flickering vending machines on slick black streets,

Each an unnatural star in the overpopulated sky of the city.

In Japan, everything was different,

The sky was bluer in daylight,

The clouds were cartoons of other cumulus elsewhere,

The autumn leaves so red, the trees seemed on fire,

Unknown sea creatures wobbled in tiny bowls at breakfast,

And food was served like art at an auction.

The tiny mountains lay like discarded pointed party hats on the horizon,

Smaller and sadder than the skyscrapers,

Steamy fog seemed to hover around their steep slopes.

Japan was no rolling tumbling place,

Not the gentle green hills of my childhood,

Or the twisting cobbled streets of my home,

There were no ancient carved stone churches,

Scarred by the years of grey rain.

Japan’s sunsets were a fierce and violent purple,

Its shrines, the red colour of essential blood pumped from the heart,

Its people were quiet but furious,

Bowing heads of smooth dark hair,

Its castles were not the castles of my memory,

But tiered and stretched high, like wooden wedding cakes.

Japan was my moon,

Distant and ambitious,

An orbiting world spinning round my own consciousness,

And a breathtakingly blinding dream of difference,

A planet and people so startlingly removed from my own.

And yet, it was in this alien land that I came to Earth itself,

Hours ahead of the rest,

And now years behind us all.

Japan’s difference is my own,

It is as old and new as I am,

Its many contradictions are like the conflicts of my very soul,

And yet somehow it forms the perfect picture,

A wondrous memory of freedom ,

For me to close my eyes and see.