VACATING BUKIT TIMAH CAMPUS
(for Norman Sherry)

Morning's curious tumescence disarms.
From my desk I watch, agreeably,
Delicate sunlight-speckled rain
Settle diamonds on each leaf.
Out of huddled trees recurring orioles
Call sudden black and gold.

Somnolent, wet with sound, with anagram
The years return, affirm their lore
Pure as solitude burning cool and inward.
Again I feel the valley contend with Mandai
Hill; watch a spider's web emerge discreetly;
Father's pride made final by Strickland's
Prickly anger; all twelve Zeroes I mistook
For tumbling eagles of the sun; war's end,
The return to school, to Old Lob's Farm;
Then your Quadrangle's charted learning.

Nomadic, intellectual years distilled
Hungers no others held. In this declining
Monsoon a few particulars spiral, ruminate;
Obsessions in search of corridors and keys,
Apt simplicities stripping power masks,
Regain the earth, move us to becoming.

Cogito, ergo sum.

The heart unlocked brown seasons, hatched
Conversions, a sense of scrutiny. Descartes,
Donne, literature of the upper case, a call to
Poetry, the great tradition, ample gifts at times
Too confidently marked by empire, self-
Investiture, a hand which took from habit.

Among great cathedral voices the flight
Cum reggae shuffle of Ariel cum Caliban,
Shylock's Jewish anger turning Othello's
Cause destroyed by stars Iago so arranged.
And there was Yeats who knew the ways of
Disappointment, who, striding battlements,
Felt heroic Irish mist construct out of his
Third world agony nothing but the truth of
Contradictions in a bitter, rising Easter noon.
Add good Man Friday given English lessons

To psyches tempest-tossed towards the
Bay of new deservings; to fields of light
Defining a true eye, the holy boundaries
Of our islands, histories riding anticipations
In blood and soul, quickening old-fashioned
Summonses of sun, rain, tree, the earth,
This memory.

Edwin Thumboo

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