Cheng Him, Singapore
tekong
past refrain, where we tread is indelible, stained in each grain of sand.
when i upend my boots to clean them, out comes the history of sand.
it begins in Angkor Wat, where the bomb craters and the bullet holes
tell the story of how coppered the world was when the forest turned to sand.
now, standing on what used to be the sea, i am in her throat, at the strait,
where it smells of salt, of iron, the colour of industry and the graft of sand.
i know how we learn to defend our country: on the back of a poorer one.
has it always been this way, this noble appropriation of foreign sand?
what do we protect? not the Khmer whose rivers are uprooted into the sea.
our guns bay for their banks, so they dredge their waters to sell us their sand.
i watch as the sea surges past Tekong, as a crown of sandflies rise from a
saltwater puddle. this is hardly natural, nothing grows on this self-salting sand.
my tongue dissolves, like the shores the derricks spit on. it is easy to swear
fealty to mud, recite an oath, but the truth is that all this is nothing but sand.
when tomorrow comes, it will rise with violence. if you press your ears to
the dirt south of Dogra bridge there will always be bombs bursting in the sand.
but for now, there is only the silence of capitulation. forget what Robert Yeo said,
this mud on my face cannot be mine; even the dust in Tekong is stolen sand.
mata puteh
a day mumbles to itself. a tree learns to slant, and a puteh sings inside its cage.
listen to its song, it trills, it sings of roundness, of the world that is the cage.
i like to think that i am good at this, this act of living and watching
the world, as though i too, am a puteh sticking its head out of its cage.
the puteh, white eyed, sings clear as evening after a storm; is it privy to the
secrets of the earth? of water, air, and light, these things outside its cage?
how sad then, to hear its clarion song. it leaps about the park, over the heads
of mimosas, ixoras, angsanas, each a verdant wind blowing past its cage.
the other putehs, far away, have come to orbit their entrapped cousin,
as though to bring all the corners under heaven into its rattan cage.
even now, i can almost feel their wings dusting the corners of my heart.
imagine that! the world in a puteh's beak, turning on a wheel inside a cage.
Cheng Him's work has been featured in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), The Kindling, and the Eunoia Review. They are part of the writing group known as The ATOM Collective.