Ideas of Modernity in Singapore

Ideas of Modernity in Singapore

Ideas of Modernity in Singapore

1

A few generations on from sampan and creek,
ships like warehouses queue outside the docks,
student mandarins crowd the business schools

and the SingTel tower’s huge electronic Babel
sends the voices of a planetary chatter flying.
Only connect, wrote Forster. He’d be amazed.

Above your Sparta, your Athens of technology
a white-bloused broker, her screens like oracles,
emails a bank in Dubai Hedge euros with yen

as mechanized helots scrub and sluice the streets
and tourists, vaguely puzzled, wander a city-state
so disciplined, diligent, secure, demure and rich.

To note that humans were once hunter-gatherers
and survived for millennia sans television and cars
suggests a metamorphosis, a rupture with the past.

But hasn’t the modern always spawned the now?
I think of that tiny, exquisite web of molecules
which first snagged a speeding photon of the sun.

I think of that brilliant linguist, that mother-ape
who standing up on a plain, her brain straining,
frantic for her infant, blurted the original noun.

A mind-Bang! like Hubble’s – peering in a darkroom
at dripping photos of stars, when it flashed on him
that time and the galaxies go on, and on, and on.

2

Modernity’s a youngish planet, weaned from dust;
the warm wet fug of a bio-sphere; a dividing cell;
a continuity with pauses, as the rain in Singapore.

You prompted these ideographs, this water-colour,
Edwin, when you dropped in to wish me goodbye,
sputtering with enthusiasms, caritas and laughter.

You were a Li Po, in the Sanskrit of a batik shirt,
a deep-water port of literatures, a Pauline orient,
a Gandhian occident, a spray, a monsoon of words.

In the high-ceilinged foyer of the Visitor’s Lodge
your grandchildren raced around the arm-chairs
as we tried to talk writing in the din of family glee.

A toddler, his arms up high, ran chortling at you,
and, mid-speech, you raised and hugged him close,
as modernity’s earth-place still raises you and me.