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Moving People With Words

Poems on the MRT

Renovation by Edwin Thumboo

 

I want to feel pure the wind
Glazed by dark narrating shadows
Among casuarinas tempered by sea-salt.

I want to see brown the hawk
Unrelenting beautiful death-dealing
Break open the unsuspecting sky.

I want to hear forked the tongue
From an uncoiling body tracking
Lusty crickets in the loam.

I want to touch blue the haze
Dimming Karimon, over-reach
Unknotted slopes to possible mysteries.

I want to taste sharp the petai
Straight from the curling pod
To hold the village in my mouth.

I want these five beginnings.

Published in A Third Map: New and Selected Poems (1993)

Credit: Roy Kheng

Edwin Nadason Thumboo is a poet and academic who is regarded as one of the pioneers of English literature in Singapore. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore from 1980 to 1991, NUS’s longest-serving dean. Thumboo was the first Chairman and Director of the university’s Centre for the Arts from 1993 to 2005. Thumboo has won the National Book Development Council of Singapore Book Awards for Poetry three times, in 1978, 1980 and 1994. He has also received the inaugural S.E.A. Write Award (1979), the first Cultural Medallion for Literature (1979), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Cultural and Communication Award (Literature) (1987), and the Raja Rao Award (2002). He conceived the first National Poetry Festival for Singapore in 2015.

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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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