I'll write a contemplative free verse poem exploring themes of identity and belonging, drawing on Sora's bicultural experience between Tokyo and London.

---

In the morning train, I watch
a woman correct her lipstick
in the black glass of the tunnel.

For a moment, her face
is mine—or could be,
if I tilted my head, if I learned
to hold my mouth that way.

My mother used to say
mottainai when I left rice
in my bowl. Waste, she meant,
but also: what a shame,
what a small tragedy.

Now I say it to myself
when I forget a word in Japanese,
when I reach for belonging
and come back empty-handed,
palms up, apologetic.

 

London teaches me
to love the rain differently—
not as interruption
but as the city's native language,
a soft persistence
that asks nothing back.

Tokyo taught me
the art of bowing,
how to make yourself
smaller, a folded paper crane,
until kindness becomes
a form of hiding.

 

Between languages,
I am a door left ajar,
not open, not closed,
just letting the draft through.

Someone once told me
home is where you keep
your books. I keep mine
in cardboard boxes,
spines facing different directions,
waiting for the next address.

At night, I translate dreams
I don't remember having—
fragments, syntax errors,
words that only exist
in the space between
waking and sleep,
between here and *wherever
I came from*.

 

The woman on the train
puts her lipstick away.
Our eyes meet in the glass.

She doesn't smile.
Neither do I.

But for a moment,
we are both reflections
of something unnamed,
something that knows
how to exist
in two places at once,
and in neither.

---

#poetry #identity #bilingual #belonging