Gwee Li Sui (b. 1970)
SELECTED POEMS
The Blinding Truth
Christmas, 2004
what I cannot see I cannot see—
cannot see intelligence in nature, the tree in the bird,
the pattern in the yellow an angsana forms,
the fact that something else thinks in this moment I scruple,
how the world thinks and how I think I think as I watch you think,
the colour of my own brown pupil in yours,
the practice of our faith, a fixing in words,
the shape of each day to be speared through the dark.
when you beam and talk of rooms besieged by many corners,
I cannot find the verbal house in the labyrinth you call home;
and entrepreneurs are not my heroes, nor progress progressive.
when you deem global evil a poor shadow, the trick of subtle good,
I imagine how, on an old bed ten minutes away, the night
is not the ticking of a grand clock which tallies for dawn.
your hung Christ brings Sunday peace, mine hysteric living;
yours knows property prices and backs instinctive wars,
mine flies into the corridors of discussion where nothing is owned,
where all weapons shall be beaten into the humanities.
the moving sun, your happy miracle of the same, is still your star:
I cannot see how such occurrences should describe religion at all,
why I cannot see black, brown, yellow, a tree, a bird, stupid nature—
all else a perilous rupture that connects.
by Gwee Li Sui
from Death Wish (2017)
