Lee Tzu Pheng (b. 1946)

leetzupheng.png

SELECTED POEMS

Cathedral Windows

How right the poet was who called
man a brittle, crazie glasse,
unable to convey God's word,
but also, that with grace at last,
cracks may delineate fine forms;
though stained, he can reflect his God.

Poetry alone cannot reveal
the aptness of the analogue,
but coming here to see and feel
the Master's spirit in their work,
these jewelled windows of the air
make the poet's meaning clear.

Our words and pictures need the light
to capture what's beyond mere sight.

Rome

Excluding Byzantium

on objections to living near
a home for the elderly sick

"That is no country for old men."
The ageing poet meant another place,
the body contemptible, incompatible
with the passions of the mind:

it is easier, somehow, to bear such ostracism;
art has the compensation of its own realities;
art can mould pain into singing birds,
and scarecrows image saints in holy fires.

Outside of art, what consolations thrive?
Decrepitude may push you to the side of life.
Sickness can make a stranger of the best-loved face.
Mortality's a monster, some think better
relegated to a hidden place.
Hospices and nursing homes may reek
of worse than age; a lingering pall
sour the taste of all human endeavour.
It takes much more than empathy, perhaps
to receive the aged sick into our midst
without protest, even unvoiced, while
life points us to our expected end.

How many will have art to keep them safe?
How many, art to house our grim reminders?
We know we but banish ourselves to claim
"this is no country for old men".

Graffiti in the Ladies

In the privacy
of this public lavatory
someone has purged
herself of her oppressors
and stereotypical docility:

from the Emperor of Japan
to Indira Gandhi,
and underlings in between;
PMs, MPs, the lot –
all called to judgement
in torturous outpouring:
sentenced for crimes,
nepotic dynasties, taxes,
arrogance, brutalities,
even sexual excesses,
as crudely enumerated
as mind-boggling.

You hear a voice
too freedom-bound to shut up
in its executions.
The warped calligraphy
is like a dance of death;
she prefers to strip herself
for solitary audiences
whose response she may anticipate,
the place's ambience being
safe, accommodating frame.

You wonder if it's shock or shame
that you feel. Or maybe both.

It's easy to say
someone hysterical did this.

Does violence have a gender?
Has woman been clapped so much in her place
she has no room to face her demons
but the public lavatory?
Surely this vandalizing speaks much more
than the writing on the wall?

Lambada by Galilee

i

They are doing the lambada
by the Sea of Galilee,
the singing and the noise
blasting up the promenade
to the Quiet Beach Hotel,
where I am trying to understand
this great event, of being here,
where paralytic, demoniac and blind
found peace at the quiet word
of a wandering miracle-man.

Far from paralyzed these revellers,
though demoniac may well describe the scene;
the women, barely visible from my room but
visibly bare, are treading invisible water,
their drowning gestures more than a sign
of the unfinished work of the Nazarene.
The band is celebrating a new Tiberian glory,
beating up a frenzy of maudlin worship
of love, of peace, shaloms of nostalgic agony,
and a new Herodias bawls her strange love protest:
"Y're drivin' me crazy!"

And indeed she is driving me crazy,
and those of us who thought
to find quiet in the land of Galilee.

ii

I feel unredeemed tonight,
confused by this un Galilean turmoil,
the mind horridly agape (not agape)
at the undeniable lure of these sensual songs.
I do not know if this silly sympathy
is thwarted expectation asking more,
or simply the reluctant recognition
that these lambada lovers,
so much more present to the present,
would have been warmly welcome
at that love-feast, and
the host himself seen us as pharisaical.

Thamby

As long as I remember having brothers
he was one. "Thamby" we called him,
the gardener, kindly and strong; his smile
promising fun. (Somehow I don't recall him
working at the garden, though he must have done.)
It was natural to enlist him
in our games, when childhood did not
baulk at age or race, our world hospitable
as the sheltering flame tree we
played under, our hearts free
to savour holidays, and sun, and time.

He taught us Tamil numbers on request,
the syllables super-rollicking to our ears, then
chased us in mock rage when we
in helpless mirth made nonsense of his tongue.
Once, locked in the outhouse loo, in hide-and-seek,
my sister and me he found, and when
we pretended not to know the game was up
he reached over the door and swatted us
with a giant papaya leaf, till we ran out
shrieking with laughter, but he did not mind.

We left him when we left Katong
for the other side of the island; too far
for him to travel, father said. I saw them thank
each other, take their leave; then we
said our goodbyes, with heavy hearts, though soon
buoyed up by the thought of our new home.
I wonder if he missed us as we did him,

our "Thamby", a part of our earliest days:
a friendship taking root, a kinship sprung.
I think he tended more than just our garden.

by Lee Tzu Pheng
from Lambada by Galilee & Other Surprises (1997)

 

SELECTED POEMS: “Seki Shun” >