Heng Siok Tian (b. 1963)
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Sonnet to an arrival: Changi Jewel 2019
Written by Heng Siok Tian
Dated 19 Jun 2020
This experiment / project offers me the perfect, legitimate opportunity to revise the sonnet since it was written as a kind of tribute to our airport. Now that Changi Airport has gone through another facelift, it seems appropriate to update my tribute too.
The poem “Sonnet to an arrival: Changi Airtropolis 1992” was originally published in Crossing the chopsticks and other poems (1993, UniPress).
Sonnet to an arrival: Changi Airtropolis 1992
Airy aeons ago, t’was ancient dreamer
Icarus gave flight to aero-history.
Could he have surmised dual terminals
or today’s Changi techno-sophistry?From mind’s cockpit, I pilot air-pages:
Kallang, Paya Lebar, Changi reclaimed,
Modest means, stuttering startings air-chase
Concordes, Airbus, Supersonic air-fame.Engineered fantasies (nothing airy)
is wizardry, winning streak, will-ingness;
taxiway ease economic esteem,
Raffles class, duty-free … bolster business.Icarus’ illusion mythologized
did not hint of Airtropolis realised
The below is the revised poem.
Sonnet to an arrival: Changi Jewel 2019
Icarus, ancient dreamer, who brought flight
to aero-history (framed in Brueghel paints);
could he have surmised dual terminals
or Changi’s burgeoning sophistry?From mind’s cockpit, I pilot air-pages:
Kallang, Paya Lebar, Changi and now Jewel fame.
Modest means, stuttering startings air-chase
Concorde, Airbus, Boeing; all for air games.Engineered fantasies (nothing airy)
is wizardry, winning streak, will – ingness;
taxiways ease economic esteem,
changing names for sky-suite businesses.Could Icarus’s illusion chronicled
have foretold air-travel miracles?
I had to change the “pretensiousness” of the “airy aeons ago”. In my naïve youth, I had wanted to capture the seemingly “archaic” expression, clueless of how out of sync that was.
With the exception of the last line, the second quatrain was kept intact; as is the case for the third quatrain.
An additional note: Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Landscape with The Fall of Icarus (c. 1560) inspired W H Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”.
I decided to reframe the idea of the last couplet as a question for we never know what else and how else air travel, airports could herald. Indeed, only time will tell. Of course given our current COVID-19 predicament, the couplet has become ironic!
