Two Poems by Theophilus Kwek
*
First Sighting
Lord Central King Batara of the Three World Realms
Sang Nila Utama
What you have heard – that we came after rain
to a sun-drenched shore, hulls full of nothing
but reams of hope and our Sumatran air –
never happened. In truth it was like this:
Weathering north one September, fearing
the harvest storms, or pirates from Kedah,
we steered by hand to dock between islands
some leagues apart, and wait out the season.
Of course the skies gave way and would not stop.
We took in the sails, then returned above
to plead for calm with whatever we owned.
Nothing worked. I had kept my crown, the men
their gold (it was, we believed, no time for
miracles) when it appeared, moving us
all: the washed pearl of a city, without
conceit, its fuzz of cloud lifting the haze,
streets flush with wet. Better than prayer.
Distantly a snarl of small mountains seemed
to spill up into squall, and out of reach.
We made toward land. Now all that is gone.
Often I wish the storms would come again,
and clouds, turned once more to beasts, grace us
here with their proud monsoons. But who am I
to dream of lions? Already the rivers
slip into drains, drains vanish beneath roads,
and the roads become another city
where history will alight, then move on.
Look. We have raised our best ships to the sky,
sent them to find a better country. If
only the rains returned and made us see.
Foreign Relations
“There is something unreal and odd about lumping our relations with Malaysia under foreign relations.” – S. Rajaratnam, 17 December 1965.
*
i.
At three, no-one could tell us apart.
We hid, fought, learnt to read, then write
our names, dressed in the same colours,
went to school. Grew separate, as siblings do.
You learnt to drive. I went overseas
and returned after some years’ travel
to find you unchanged, only older,
a stone’s throw from our childhood home
having wandered later from its orbit,
your own man. Nowadays we keep
our distances, and our friends
close enough to avoid comparisons,
making sure to count the years that pass
between us, like ships without harbour.
*
ii.
Remember the time, on the way back
from keeping those older boys off our street
when you tripped, nearly fell, over a rock
no larger than a fist? We were already late,
and the last light had gone, so it seemed
the path was going too, from under your feet.
I held your shoulder, afraid of falling too,
but tipped us sideways into uncut grass
along the slope, soiling us both.
You swore. I caught myself. Still we came
almost to blows in that aftermath,
not trying to establish who pushed whom,
or for what reason, only in fear: of arriving
last at home, and with a different story.
*
iii.
Say you’ll go with me, when the rains come,
to the blocks where we used to live,
you know the ones (tall as parents, stood close)
before we moved out, wanting our own ways.
What did we know then? In our old rooms
we’ll pick up the phones, and I’ll hear your voice
or you’ll hear mine, the water in the wall
crackling through our landline like the sea
to call us home again for the long weekend
because it’s been a while, after all
since we were last back, you and I together
in this house, with all the furniture we bought
when good as new, and the plans we made,
to mark the casting-off we knew as birth.
~
Theophilus Kwek is the author of two collections, They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011) and Circle Line (2013), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014. He won the Martin Starkie Prize in 2014 and the Jane Martin Prize in 2015, and is President of the Oxford University Poetry Society.
Paul Choy is a documentary photographer based in Mauritius; he travels the world telling the stories of the places he visits, and the people he meets, through the photographs he captures.
