Wait well,
Kabesa Kristang.
Stand quietly,
and let their riches fade slowly,
into shining, shimmering dust.
It is the same shore,
and the same, mesmerising sun.
It is the same world
some of your ancestors betrayed.
The same place where the unconscious once
ran wild with unimpeachable hunger:
for, if you will believe the histories, just mere labour.
But you, Portuguese-Eurasian glow-glow dancer:
you know all too well what else those in power
sometimes, many times,
always, throughout history---
what these real men of empire
often desired
from other men.
Sometimes from boys.
Always from the Creator's beautiful dark-skinned toys.
Sit quietly,
Merlionsman;
the dead already make far too much noise
in us, those who still hope for
Life, untamed, untarnished;
a Life somehow unified
regardless of what once happened here.
Regardless of what history very often seeks to elide.
You, like your forbears, have somehow managed to survive
journeys to all seven inhabited continents; unlike them, you have never tried to deny
the truth of what must come for all of us, one day, one night, in one raging, ravenous glimpse of spacetime:
why, just this.
The sun.
The sky.
The gentle surging
of an unquiet, unceasing tide.
The sounds of the forest.
The flames that still burn in earnest ---
the ways to still speak of
what could one day
still be made right.
No posts