Ian Goh, Singapore
Cranes
They chipped away at concrete and steel,
one wall torn down at a time,
a million or so locals of the hyper-plex
bending under the weight of machinery.
They dug from the three-thousandth floor,
paper permits shoved into faces, wall
to wall, kids with seconds to run
before the great cranes swooped on their triple-decker beds,
less care afforded for the old, sick or those plain caught
dreaming on the loo.
Soon, they broke into caverns and caves,
wild life given time and space
to raise whole jungles, even an ocean pooled
from the blood, sweat and tears
of generations before.
Finally, they reached the heart of the complex:
a one-room flat, frozen in time,
a man and woman in bed, hands clasped
in each other’s firm, eternal slumber,
disturbed by the slow rumble
of cranes.
Kitsune
As we scaled a mountain within a city,
my wife saw a fox spirit poke its ears
through the cedar trees of the forest.
‘It’s glaring at us,’ she said, invaders
of this place with shadows for eyes,
slow murmur of stone and slate,
clean exhalation of the mountain’s
breath on our weary faces. Here, past the grey bounds
of city and scape, we were but wolf pups
grown from brick and glass, our souls steeled
and shut within virgin groves till we lusted
for innocence over.
My wife whispered to the fox: ‘We come to pay our dues
to our old selves, past-present pilgrimage to a place
where the air is still, like forgotten breaths,
and our skin tingles from the memory of what might have been.’
The fox nodded, bowing its head
before vanishing behind a lonely holt.
There, on the threshold between worlds,
it lies in wait of its true master, while we
continue searching for ours.
Ian Goh is a Literary Arts teacher at School of the Arts (SOTA) Singapore. His work has appeared in QLSR, the Eunoia Review, Star*Line magazine, and elsewhere. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.
