We’ve come a long way, haven’t we,
you and I?
All the way from those first crazy days
when they tried to deny
just how good your story was,
and just how filled with light
even though you supposedly died.
Even though no matter how hard I have tried,
I have never been able to bring you back to life
except in me.
You, and that damnable, pesky Merlion,
you kept meeting me on the beach;
and I?
I became both of you,
after a time;
or maybe you, and you
were finally recognised as mine.
My story.
My trauma, and my glory.
My shaking fist, at the Rajawali,
and the thunder and lightning, and all of the people I lost
when they sent us to fight. No more dead heroes; nothing more, in the enormity
of just wanting my best friend back.
Of just wanting the person I glimpsed
to return, and not to stab me, over and over again
to death. He gave me the keris,
and the lembri, and the melka, and the nangsa,
the letters of a new sense
that this time it would be something more.
Naufal Jazair b Muhammad Masud—
greatest Merlionsman of the Kingdom of Singapura,
and now, this Merlionsman’s signal fire, enshrouded, at last, in truth—
word is, out there, on the sea, that there are many roads to the roots
where you lie, slumbering, between the gentle arms of the Tree of Life.
It could be an altered state of consciousness.
Or maybe, just maybe
just a glimpse of how little it all comes to matter in time.
Just Bahana’s tears, and song, telling you over and over again
that you are made of such dawning, unstoppable might.