QCE52B NIE Lit 2018

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When my father dies and comes back as a dog, I already know what his favorite sound will be: the soft, almost inaudible gasp as the rubber lips of the refrigerator door unstick, followed by that arctic exhalation of cold air; then the cracking of the ice-cube tray above the sink and the quiet ching the cubes make when dropped into a glass. Unable to pronounce the name of his favorite drink, or to express his preference for single malt, he will utter one sharp bark and point the wet black arrow of his nose imperatively up at the bottle on the shelf, then seat himself before me, trembling, expectant, water pouring down the long pink dangle of his tongue as the memory of pleasure from his former life shakes him like a tail. What I’ll remember as I tower over him, holding a dripping, whiskey-flavored cube above his open mouth, relishing the power rushing through my veins the way it rushed through his, what I’ll remember as I stand there is the hundred clever

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is starry and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer. My heart looks for

You ask for a poem.  I offer you a blade of grass.  You say it is not good enough.  You ask for a poem.  I say this blade of grass will do.  It has dressed itself in frost,  It is more immediate  Than any image of my making.  You say it is not a poem,  It is a blade of grass and grass  Is not quite good enough.  I offer you a blade of grass.  You are indignant.  You say it is too easy to offer grass.  It is absurd.  Anyone can offer a blade of grass.  You ask for a poem.  And so I write you a tragedy about  How a blade of grass  Becomes more and more difficult to offer,  And about how as you grow older  A blade of grass  Becomes more difficult to accept.

Singapore you are not my country. Singapore you are not a country at all. You are surprising Singapore, statistics-starved Singapore, soulful Singapore of tourist brochures in Japanese and hourglass kebayas. You protest, but without picketing, without rioting, without Catherine Lim, but through your loudspeaker media, through the hypnotic eyeballs of your newscasters, and that weather woman who I swear is working voodoo on my teevee screen. Singapore, what are these lawsuits in my mailbox? There are so many sheaves, I should have tipped the postman. Singapore, I assert, you are not a country at all. Do not raise your voice against me, I am not afraid of your anthem although the lyrics are still bleeding from the bark of my sapless heart. Not because I sang them pigtailed pinnafored breakfasted chalkshoed in school But because I used to watch telly till they ran out of shows. Do not invite me to the podium and tell me to address you properly. I am allergic to microphone

pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.  Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.  I am not cruel, only truthful,  The eye of a little god, four-cornered.  Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.  It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.  Faces and darkness separate us over and over.  Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,  Searching my reaches for what she really is.  Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.  I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.  She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.  I am important to her. She comes and goes.  Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.  In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish. 

Today I am going to kill something. Anything. I have had enough of being ignored and today I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day, a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets. I squash a fly against the window with my thumb. We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in another language and now the fly is in another language. I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name. I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half the chance. But today I am going to change the world. Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself. I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain. I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking. Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph. There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar. He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out. The pavements glitter suddenly

After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises and you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes ahead with the grace of woman, not the grief of a child and you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure you really are strong you really do have worth and you learn and you learn with every goodbye, you learn…

The Arabs used to say, When a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he’s come from, where he’s headed. That way, he’ll have strength enough to answer. Or, by then you’ll be such good friends you don’t care. Let’s go back to that. Rice? Pine nuts? Here, take the red brocade pillow. My child will serve water to your horse. No, I was not busy when you came! I was not preparing to be busy. That’s the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world. I refuse to be claimed. Your plate is waiting. We will snip fresh mint into your tea.

You are the bread and the knife, The crystal goblet and the wine... -Jacques Crickillon You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening

October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen I study my father's embarrassed young man's face. Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string of spiny yellow perch, in the other a bottle of Carlsbad Beer. In jeans and denim shirt, he leans against the front fender of a 1934 Ford. He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity, Wear his old hat cocked over his ear. All his life my father wanted to be bold. But the eyes give him away, and the hands that limply offer the string of dead perch and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, and don't even know the places to fish?

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to littl

I remember rooms that have had their part In the steady slowing down of the heart. The room in Paris, the room at Geneva, The little damp room with the seaweed smell,  And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—  Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. But there is the room where we (two) lie dead, Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again  As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed Out there in the sun—in the rain.

In an effort to get people to look  into each other’s eyes more,  and also to appease the mutes,  the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred  and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words,  so I slowly whisper I love you  thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line  and listen to each other breathe.

I want you and you are not here. I pause in this garden, breathing the colour thought is   before language into still air. Even your name is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer   than the words I have you say you said before. Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me   with a look, standing here whilst cool late light   dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,   but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,   inventing love, until the calls of nightjars interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,   into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day – A sunny day with leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play  Your first game of football, then, like a satellite  Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away Behind a scatter of boys. I can see You walking away from me towards the school  With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free  Into a wilderness, the gait of one Who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure, eddying away Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem, Has something I never quite grasp to convey About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching  Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay. I have had worse partings, but none that so  Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly  Saying what God alone could perfectly show –  How selfhood begins with a walking away,  And love is proved in the letting go.

Numbered 260 by Franklin I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers - Adrienne Rich Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rossetti Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.

Missing - Alfian Sa'at He go to school. Never come back. I make police report. Newspaper, Crime Watch. They even put his picture, He and the other boy, On poster, with reward From fast-food restaurant. I ask from the RC man: Can I have it from the Lift lobby noticeboard. He give me and also say sorry. I have it in my bedroom. Every morning with half- Open eyes I remind myself My son: the one on the left. Got calls come in once. Say they saw him in Penang, selling videos. Or in Bangkok, begging. Child prostitute they say. Sometimes no voice at all. Hello? Hello? Who is this? I am your son. Then hang up. So many things to remember. His school is still there. I walk to it sometimes; Pretend I am him. Praying come kidnap me Take me away now. Got one artist try to draw My son's grown-up face. I ask him draw one For every year. He say cannot. Got one time I was on TV. Crying, with schoolbag on my lap. Keep saying, good boy, always help me

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.

They should not have left him there alone,  Alone that is except for the cat.  He was only nine, not old enough  To be left alone in a basement flat,  Alone, that is, except for the cat.  A dog would have been a different thing,  A big gruff dog with slashing jaws,  But a cat with round eyes mad as gold,  Plump as a cushion with tucked-in paws---  Better have left him with a fair-sized rat!  But what they did was leave him with a cat.  He hated that cat; he watched it sit,  A buzzing machine of soft black stuff,  He sat and watched and he hated it,  Snug in its fur, hot blood in a muff,  And its mad gold stare and the way it sat  Crooning dark warmth: he loathed all that.  So he took Daddy's stick and he hit the cat.  Then quick as a sudden crack in glass  It hissed, black flash, to a hiding place  In the dust and dark beneath the couch,  And he followed the grin on his new-made face,  A wide-eyed, frightened snarl of a grin,  And he took the stick and he thrust it in,  Hard and qu