The first was a class act without a classroom;
the second was the one that took it apart, and made it magic, and fact, and home.
The third gave us somewhere a little briefer to stay,
and the fourth made it into the Straits Times, and history's dawning day.
The fifth even further, brought to dreaming life by the BBC,
and the sixth by the New York Times, and the Business Times, and AFP.
The seventh rode the waves of our first Festival,
and the eighth took us all the way to Pasir Ris East, and to a new carnival
of relationships demanding transformation; after our ninth, for survival
we found ourselves at Cairnhill for our tenth, where trauma and upheaval
would finally find us, in the midst of our eleventh, where a great evil
was unleashed upon us all, as we struggled to finish our twelfth:
COVID-19 was wreckage, and devastation, and an online thirteenth, a retrieval:
And our fourteenth, back to the great outdoors, was still another death-defying revival.
Our fifteenth was small, but even more tremendously free, and experiential:
and our sixteenth will be out of the sea, and over the rainbow, and for the first time, queer:
there will be no more denials.
There will be no more rehearsals, no more recitals.
No more attempts to convince and belittle
who we are. What we stand for. How much we love this island, no matter how much it makes us spiral
into fear, and terror, and loneliness, and insignificance.
Nothing else has come forward of such magnifying brilliance
and quiet, unshakeable confidence.
Nothing else has quite as fully understood
the music of Orion sa Gordel, and Osiris.
Nothing else but a language, a culture and a very Last People
who are filled with the strength, and hope, and resplendence.
Nothing else but the Greatest Journey of all:
isti pra tudu, siarang, siara, siuris.
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