Evening by Batok Town
My day begins to heal, regain
A modicum of poise as evening takes
Nostalgia which the sky implies.
The sun's gradual genuflection seems
Ample in the eyes' receiving centre.
Clouds, middling to spectacular, twist
To disengage while random access grows
Alert, retrieving gall and honey in the
Moment, as memory anoints earlier days,
As earlier days...this sky, again.
No rainbow yet; perhaps there will be
None this time. But, craved by light,
Clouds still intimate. A troop of dwarfs
Are on manoeuvres; La Cha about to quantum
Leap; a grey-gold dragon transmutes
Receding blue into flared vermilion as
Its claws etch the first stars. Further
East, Krishna's chariot stands resplendent
While Arjuna, cleansed of doubt, now arms,
Reluctantly. Below
These deep recurrences,
These shifting runes
That touched my father, now my son,
And so all three again, are images:
Vigilant Bukit Batok topped by radar;
MRT accompanying Avenue 5;
Four-point blocks, JC, food-centre;
A young couple held by privacy
Amidst strolling families and darting
Children practising their mother-tongue.
An impatient taxi's irritating honk
Sharpens the sense which sees to feel
The festive buntings, the three prosperities.
There was a time, quite recent,
When little Guilin had no pools.
Before that the green slope of hills
Descended into plain and swamp.
Before that an old geology. Squatters
Cleared land, directed streams, built
Ponds, a temple to guardian deities; then
The quarry-road the Indians made, re-named
Perang to meet the lurking yellow peril.
Out of such energies, such history, a town.
Yet high-rise and high-way,
The new breed in search of
Gleaming jobs, the computer-mind,
Turn memory shorter than the land's.
Or that kept whole by auguries of
Spirit, descent of custom, the pain
Of friendship; or the spell in the rose...
Unless brought into the blood's necessity
By an evening sky, by immemorial
Language of cloud and light.
Edwin Thumboo
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