My Country I Will Build You Again.

Yin’s “My Country I Will Build You Again” is from his collection of “Poems of Protests and Resistance”

My Country I Will Build You Again

If the flames rise any higher

You will burn to the ground

Perhaps that is preferable

To the rotten structure white anted

Looking good on the outside

Eaten up on the inside

They have built you

Not as you should be built

On integrity, necessity and responsibility

They have built you

On their egos and greed

Not according to your needs

Where once you were a rainbow

Of brown and black and yellow

And other colours too

Now they use only brown and green

You used to be a Tower of Babel

A cacophonous confusion

Of tongues from every land

Yet your people got along

In every way they canI will wash away the stains

Accumulated through the years

With my tears

I will rebuild you

As once our founders intended

With bricks of many hue

In your garden I will plant

Flowers of every fragrance

So that we can all inhale

The perfume of our youth

Though everything else is wrong

That any day it will crumble

But your foundations are still strong

On that we will build a new country

Same as the old one

Where everyone belongs.

 

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