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Moving People With Words

Poems on the MRT

Continental Drift by Nabilah Said

 

I typed your address into
Google Maps today, then sought
to find the quickest way
from yours to mine.
The app faltered. Search results: zero.

It seems crossing oceans
needs planning, and time
is a trick of light and
happiness a cheap flight.
Your beard thickens. I grow fat.

I misplace my passport
but find it again, tucked between
letters, pictures I wanted to
hang up, wrappers.
We laugh. Close Skype window.

It is colder where I am.
l imagine us, warm
and laughing, airing our pits
while we sweat in denim.
My day lengthens. Your night falls.

Published in Call and Response: A Migrant/Local Poetry Anthology (2018)

Nabilah Said is a playwright, editor and artist who works with text as material. She has staged works with theatre companies Teater Ekamatra, The Necessary Stage and T:<Works, as well as independent creatives in Singapore. Her play ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native (2019) won Best Original Script at the 2020 Life Theatre Awards. Her play Inside Voices (2019) won the Outstanding New Work award at VAULT Festival, London, and was published by Nick Hern Books UK. Nabilah is a member of the collectives Main Tulis Group and Rupa co.lab. She has an M.A. in Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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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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