Amanda Chong (b. 1989)
SELECTED POEMS
Lamentations
Perhaps all this was to awaken us to shapes
of suffering: the bruise encircling
a nurse’s mouth as she peels off her mask.
Malls sparkling expectantly for no one.
The migrants who built them huddled
shoulder to shoulder on backs of trucks
—all this we allowed to go past us
without second glance.All this, we only began to see
when we were made to stand a metre apart:
a woman amid laden grocery carts
cradling a bag of rice because all you need
for porridge is water. A security guard
falls asleep on his feet, then dreams
of his daughter across the closed border.
She wobbles on a stool, lathers her small hands
with suds—I love you. Don’t be sick.
I love you again—her voice wandersthrough lonely cities once thronged
with people. Death distends, numbers
lose their weight. At home, statistics split
workers’ dorms from the rest of us.
Our comfort feels like shame at first,
then swells into an unsettling need
for change. We must find the cracks
where light comes through, then prise
them wider. On Sunday, a taxi driver muses
to his only passenger: How beautiful
the empty roads, now we see more clearly
the trees. I finally hear somethingshaped like praise. Each morning,
there is a moment before anything
bad happens—I see this as promise.
Each morning, the dark side of our planet
curves towards a certain sun. I call this grace.
by Amanda Chong
first published in The Straits Times (2020)
