From Music to Poetry

I don't remember ever having made any decision to write poetry. By this, I do not mean that poetry just came to me pouring itself out of the blue. Believe it or not, it started from my wanting very badly to write music...The next best thing then, I thought, was to create structures with words (words are also sounds). ~Wong Phui Nam

It's The Eye of God, Some Say

I wake to find the sun make crystallinethe city aglitter in its bowl of encircling, glowing hills,
fire near and distant tree lines into emerald
and, in the neighbouring ground of the cemetery
fused into clear glass, hatch quartz fires from bones
revealed in their nests of mortality. All have passed
into that dazzling darkness they cannot know.
It's the eye of God, some say. In towers and mansions,
the beautiful rise from their mirrors as walking dead,
the famished, grown great in mouth and maw
from consuming the earth, gag through thin reeds for gorge
and the dreamless fry under splintered boughs of light.
Grazing in a field of dreams, most do not look up
As the sun opens wide the abyss into our nether world.

Light Returns (from Against the Wilderness)

Light returns here scoured

by a season of violent weather.

The grey in it shows through

from days of rain. It eats

the green from massed trees,

all colour from the morning face

of houses in this neighbourhood.

Light returns... A dull

corrosive mist, day's sediment,

settles from the sky and hills.

In the yard, the blood and golds

of bougainvillea blacken

as the field of cow grass

moves in with opaque silences.

A God Drowns (from Against the Wilderness)

Out of the eruption of a swollen night

you came - of a moment, when the sky broke,

dividing into darkness and water.

You were cast down, to feed return

of life after disintegration of the shell

that held our world. Out of your wounds

a bursting tide of mud destroyed our fields.

All day you were present by the kapuk tree,

rousing the crows over thy brackish wastes,

a scent that kept the dogs up barking by the fence.

All night you haunt me as you keep floating back,

bloated, grey man, rejected by the waters,

caught by wire on giant cross-bars of a gate

Wrenched upstream from dusun under violent flood.

Kill Me! Kill Me! (from Against the Wilderness)

Twisted and black, that wasted tree leans out

into a lucid dream of the heavens from this hill.

Its ragged branches deepen into iron,

into a ruin of grille-work floating out to the mauve

and slag, where the sun leaves a dreamless city

to its wakefulness. To-night, after the long rains,

fruit bats and insects drown into the fumes

of generation swelling in tight buds,

bursting into a spill of flowers from the waking tree.

A warm sap gives out faint odour of man.

Out of that combustible darkness... a hint of face,

a white hanging torso from the lichen and ancient wood,

an acrid, milky cloud which holds

that sly, insidious whisper: Kill me! Kill me!