SINGAPORE I: THE STRAIT
Returning over the ruffled water, I read
the story of this city, which betrays the past
as your father you, you me and I at night myself,
listening to the ships of my native town.
Then the hole in the Causeway opens once more,
we glide with sleeping legs into the depths
of a family current withheld too long,
where hard hands caress out from strange mothers.
‘The only thing they saw, worn out with nerves:
blacker holes in the black waters of the Strait.
The only thing they could hear inside themselves:
the growing droning of outboard motors.’
SINGAPORE II: PLANTATION
The priest cuts the tree wider open, dips
your fingers vexingly in the white juice,
naming in several languages at the same time the power
that feeds a stronger imagination than mine.
‘Men cursed and stumbled over weapons,
over each other, shouting for lamps.
And the rubber boats kept on coming,
they approached, relentlessly, like a judgment.’
I, staying behind in the old light, wrench
the knife, suddenly pulling out myself
to an unusually saturated time.
The blade still quivers in the trunk. You in me.
SINGAPORE III: KRANJI MEMORIAL
‘And before they had properly realised
what was happening, they were fighting with bayonets
in the marshy plantations, and the Japanese, laughing
with simplicity, were everywhere and nowhere.’
My pen jabs into time, jabs anew, time after time
but their conversation keeps on breaking down,
they remain uncles and aunts on a visit after the sermon
in our house full of fly-catchers, compulsory twilight.
The sight on the Strait at sunset
deepens for a moment into an insight: death
is not this damp field full of crosses, a knife
in the stomach; guilt within one’s own circle.
Publisher: In de Knipscheer, December 2003.
Book: € 15,00, cd (music by Dirk Stromberg): € 18,00. Set book + cd: € 29,50.
Postbox 6107, 2011 HC Haarlem, The Netherlands.
www.alberthagenaars.nl
www.indeknipscheer.nl
