Poetry

Tanglin Halt and After the Fire

Poetry | Yong Shu Hoong

Yong Shu Hoong is the joint winner of the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for Poetry in English.

Tanglin Halt

I’d like to think that the table was wooden

and round and out in the open, to milk

the rustic effect. There is a novelty

in almost everything when you’re below

a certain age – like the plate of pork chops

and fries, so unlike what Grandmother cooked

at home. But I halt myself before memories

fully crystallise – and what is it exactly

that I’m trying to remember anyway:

the taste of salt upon the tip of my tongue,

the atmosphere? I strive to imagine

the helplessness of being young and poor

and open, wide-eyed, to the generosity

of aunts and uncles. This is when my mind

begins to wander – to what film we’d caught

just before dinner at hawker centre.

And right on cue, I remember oily fingers.

After the Fire

The next morning, after the fire, the factory still stands, its gutted roofing two charred slices of bread, white smoke hovering like fog or a ghost unwilling to sally forth. In the news, there is nothing yet, despite the building’s sufferance through the night. My poem about the fire still attracts comments over Facebook, in a different dimension. Things can’t be so bad if we can get poetry out of them, a friend writes. And I wonder: Can things be so bad that no words can dampen the wounds and allow us to reconfigure the world as we only know?

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