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Moving People With Words

Poems on the MRT

Meeting Your Mother, Meeting You by David Wong Hsien Ming

 

So this is how you will age. Veins blue and green
vying for territory across your calves
Like Chinese foliage drawn across a tall vase
in real-time. She looks at me
and I see you behind the black glass of her pupils,
still wearing your high school uniform
—did she keep you here
or did you sculpt her an effigy
to leave with a clear conscience?

I ask my tongue for a word
and it shrinks away with every one,
past each stratum of mind,
through the smouldering river of memory
where devotion bubbles into void
and there is only the silence of fate.
Of all us facsimiles fighting to replace what we are copies of

Published in For The End Comes Reaching (2015)

Purchase the book here.

David Wong Hsien Ming discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch. His work explores the dualities and contradictions of being, and has appeared in publications like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Mascara Literary Review. His first collection, For the End Comes Reaching (2015) is a meditation on the loss that accompanies each having. More can be found at davidwonghsienming.wordpress.com

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Poems on the MRT is an initiative by the National Arts Council, in partnership with SMRT and Stellar Ace. Produced by Sing Lit Station, a local literary non-profit organisation, this collaboration displays excerpts of Singapore poetry throughout SMRT’s train network, integrating local literature into the daily experience of commuters. Look out for poems in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil in trains on the East-West, North-South and Circle Lines, as well as videos created by local artists and featuring local poets in stations and on trains. The Chinese, Malay, and Tamil poems are available in both the original languages and English. To enjoy the full poems, commuters may read them on go.gov.sg/potm.

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