A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Nor Dread Nor Hope

Yeow Kai Chai, Singapore

 

After W.B. Yeats

as you’re slid into the pod, i feel neither pain nor

relief, perhaps a slab of numbness. before dread

hops in. thud, thud, like that bird. neither this nor

the long shadow of reason raises one’s hope

for the reckoning: will you wake up and attend

mine too? relive the last dribbling seconds, a

realisation that this won’t happen, no. dying

is life’s last assurance that draws out an animal

yawp out of any sentient creature, as one eyes a

field opening up beyond the railing, where a man

holds the hand of his son, and a woman awaits

their return from the other side. hers, his,

mine – the entangling of hands and the end

of another unwefting… another year dreading

absences casually intruding like sunlight, and

just when the brightness retreads, you, hoping

against hope, wish the curtain would fall and all

is revealed to be mere rehearsal, and many

would not feel what i feel, each pinprick times

a million more, whenever something she or he

would do is mirrored by a stranger. he died.

she would too, barely seven years later. many

years on, breath heavy, one recounts the times

the reunion has been reenacted, so the rose,

in a deep violet she likes, may bloom again.

Yeow Kai Chai is a poet, prose writer, editor and music reviewer. He has two poetry collections, Pretend I’m Not Here (2006) and Secret Manta (2001). He co-wrote Lost Bodies: Poems between Portugal and Home (2016) and The Adopted: Stories from Angkor (2015) with three other writers. A co-editor of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), he was festival director of Singapore Writers Festival from 2015 to 2018.

Beatitude

Birch