This city is truly pure
The flowers have been sterilised
The moon inoculated
All the luminous shine of the mountains and colours of the sea
Have been distilled
Even car sounds and birdsongs have conformed to the norm
Footsteps on the streets
One following the other, one answering the other
Oddly enough, now behaving so well they are untainted
While poetry no longer causes any pain or stirs an itch,
The so-called suggestions, symbolism and ambiguity
All end up embalmed in ethanol
This city is truly pure
So pure it’s astonishing
Buildings adhere seamlessly to the ground
No sudden tantrums from the clouds
No startled wind
Not even a tendril of peculiar smell
Not to mention
Those sand grains so fond of sneaking into the eyes
Neo Choon Hong (梁钺) who adopted the pseudonym Liang Yue (梁钺), was an Assistant Director with the Ministry of Education and a senior lecturer with the National Institute of Education. His first poetry collection, So Says Tea, published in 1984, was awarded a book prize by the Singapore Book Development Council. He went on to publish four other poetry collections: Three Vicissitudes in Life, Beyond Poems, etc. His research work entitled The Direction and Footsteps of Literature was published in 2009. His poems can be widely found in both local and international anthologies.
Grace Chia is a writer and editor from Singapore who has published several books including the novel
The Wanderlusters, the short story collection
Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food and the poetry collections
Womango and
Cordelia. She is also editor of the prose anthology
We R Family and founder of Singapore’s first women’s online literary journal,
Junoesque. She participated in the first national Writer-in-Residence programme at Nanyang Technological University in conjunction with the National Arts Council from 2011–2012, during which she authored
The Cuckoo Conundrum. Grace Chia has lectured at both NTU and DigiPen, mentored emerging writers, and judged poetry competitions in Singapore.
