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.