Theophilus Kwek is a prize-winning writer and researcher based in Singapore. The author of five volumes of poetry, he has been shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize, and serves as co-editor of Oxford Poetry. His essays, poems and translations have appeared in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine, and the Mekong Review.

 

Pearl Bank

i.m. 1976-2019

 

The pillars, too, regret this.

The columns are full of outcry, staircases

weep, and the glass doors,

whose wheels are still running in their tracks.

 

In the driveway, left in haste,

are possessions too big for the moving-van:

a bedframe, a mahjong table

with its tiles discarded, a winning hand.

 

After this morning’s rain,

a smell of death has come to roost among

the debris. Look closely,

someone has emptied out the living,

 

out here, onto the street.

It is a difficult thing, to see a building

gape, and gape even wider

than the gap between its two front teeth.

 

Maybe it was the architecture

that singled it out. Socialist,

so, unfit for our times.

No room now for rooms like these,

 

level lives, a piece of God’s

blue sky for everyone. Capital, land –

the price has changed, though

old factors remain. What, then?

 

something new must come.

There will be rain again, and rain over

the earth, till another grain

sleeps, wakes, becomes a pearl.