Do away with plastic flowers
Spray no poison in the wide field
Avoid the fruit untouched by insects
Ward off the factories’ smog
Cleave not the atom’s core
Build not on estuary sand
For the soil to prosper
There is nothing you need to do
And if guilt stabs you anyway
Ignore the building interest
But just return the principal:
Plant the shade-tree’s seed
And offer the body as compost
Raju Ramesh has been a Permanent Resident in Singapore for the past 20 years, working in the IT field and indulging in classical and modern Tamil poetry. He has been associated with Tamil poetry groups such as
Kavimaalai Singapore,
Thangameen etc. In 2015, he was awarded the Kavimaalai Singapore Young poet award, and in 2016 won first prize in both the Tamil Language Festival poetry competition organised by the Singapore Indian Association, as well as the National Poetry Festival Competition. He is also the double recipient of the Honorary prize in the Singapore Golden Point Award from NAC. His works have been published in local Tamil dailies and magazines, and he is currently working on translations in Tamil and English.
Anurak Saelaow has been published in
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal,
Hayden's Ferry Review,
Quarterly Literary Review Singapore,
Cultural Weekly,
The Kindling,
Ceriph, and elsewhere. He is the author of one chapbook,
Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in creative writing and English from Columbia University.
