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Poems on the MRT

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my mother thinks i dream in bengali by Wahid Al Mamun

 

that my dreamscapes, like hers, are flooded by
incontinent rivers that carry language and fish
downstream to a subconscious shore, to be
hung to dry by an ancient fisherman. she thinks
i am the swimmer i am not. that if i plunge
feetfirst into an open sea my ankles will not
break. instead i will break the surface with a beard,
rich and salted, tagore's or my grandfather's.
my mother dreams i have her accent. some nights
she is right, with a prescience i put down to
maternal instinct. these are the nights when
language rises like air, the fish swim downstream.
the land i stand on does not subduct under
my feet. these are the nights i do not instead
dream of falling from a skyscraper into an
olympic pool. i do not fall in a language that is
bleached to bone, neither english nor bengali.

Published in QLRS Vol. 16 No. 4 (2017)

Wahid Al Mamun (he/him) is currently a first-year Ph.D. Anthropology student at McGill University, where he is studying the affects and politics of migrant worker poetry spaces and practices in Singapore. His poetry has been published in Cordite, PR&TA Journal, QLRS, Call and Response: A Migrant/Local Poetry Anthology (2018), and other poetry anthologies. He lives in Montreal, where he is fighting an attritional war against Québécois French.

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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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