2018 Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize

 

1963: Years since the end of the Second World War, Singapore gains increasing levels of self-governance under British control, moving towards a future of both uncertainty and ambition.

 

i.
 

There are times at night I awake

and don’t know where I am, cotton sheet 

 

bundled around my torso like a snare,

until the echo of rain battering

 

the zinc roof, the shuffling of my mother’s

slippered feet, and the gargle of sheets in the wind

 

places me back in my bed. That was how

I somehow always found my place

 

in time without realizing what had passed, 

like the times we leave our offerings 

 

under the banyan tree for so long, 

we never notice when they disappear

 

until now – I can lie here for hours

walking through the days I lived through myself:

 

The afternoons I spent crawling into drains to

chase after guppies and killifish, fetching water

 

in kerosene tins at the well, where someone

would pay me to retrieve their buckets that fell

in. I stood over that shade where the water

was too dark to see myself.

 

I held the fish up in a bowl under the sun

to see its scales catch light. This is everything –

 

Everything that feels unreal deep inside me,

for me to have lived and continue living

 

into quiet afternoons, interrupted by successions 

of radio cars, and early mornings alone

 

straining to hear the whir of the fan 

at the foot of my bed, drowned out by the rain.

 

The waves of water, slamming against the roof.

The fantasies that want to come through, coming through.

 

ii.

 

On the main street, outside the coffee-house

where we were sitting, waiting patiently

for the first television broadcast to play,

another one of those radio cars pass us – 

the second one I’ve seen today – 

Merdeka! Merdeka! playing through the speakers

and out of the megaphone in the hand

of the man in the passenger’s seat.

The quality of his voice far away

even though he was right in front of me

just like the nights we gathered under tents to rally,

listening to the crowd roar and to the men

on stage as they recounted stories. I was there,

though sometimes I didn’t know what they meant.

 

Other times, even when spoken directly at me

some stories occupy a space outside my mind:

My mother crouching in a drain during air raids

or my grandfather, a Chinese spy – how he hid

names of sympathizers in the shell of a pen, how

they questioned him with hoses, cured him with water,

and left him in the sun to dry.

 

The television crackles to life.

A man whom I do not know at the center of everyone’s

attention: Tonight might well mark the start 

All of us, the entire village, watch the camera

pan outwards. A nervous flag, shrinking 

in the distance. Drums building,

beginning a story the way every story

begins – with a sound.

 

iii.

 

Sitting outside on the veranda, nearing twilight

the open breeze coming and going 

moving slightly the wind chimes

 

Notes cast further and further away from me

where they hide in the hollows and fill the gaps

between every cricket’s yelp

 

 

Yesterday, a world of difference, between now and when

someone had set off firecrackers and lit one of the coffee-houses

aflame, leaving trains of stuck cars even outside our home

 

What does it say, I ask

 

my father, reclining on the rattan chair

with the morning’s paper resting on his belly

to catch the orange peel that fell as he ate

 

He is sitting just outside the light of the sole bulb

that hangs in the center of our veranda, where I sit

as my mother trims my hair with a pair of barber scissors

 

He inches forward to catch a glimpse

of the headline. Just an accident.

 

I feel like I am waiting for something

to come up from behind the silhouette 

of the banyan tree in the distance

 

A jet tears across the sky above us

My mother’s hand freezes

 

Leaving the edge of the scissors, a small thing

holding its breath

on the back of my neck