Tag: poets

If Hokusai Depicted the Shore

Posted on by Dyne

I wrote a poem inspired by an artwork at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum.

If Hokusai Depicted the Shore

I found that things do not stagnate
Always inching towards flourishing
Or decaying. Maybe enchanted
By the ocean or engulfed by the flood.
It is water in essence yet functionally
Different. I’ll fixate on this: Could they carry
A drowning man’s struggle for the surface
To the nearest shore? Please send
Help – someone help him float – hope
That it gets to the one gasping for air.

Give it a century, the man is absent
The shore is no more. The water’s 
Approach to tranquility til there’s no more surface to cover. It would be difficult
To hope otherwise.

RPF

Posted on by Dyne

He was fast, smart and tried
To scribble through the great war
Scrambled through numbers
In desperation or drought he fought
For his wife or for science – I can’t
Tell the difference. How could he live
Her last few months speaking
In coded letters that required someone
Else’s eyes. And then whatever was to him are numbers was someone else incinerated on the other side.


No one there put a bullet through someone’s brain, at least a helmet could
Catch it. Eureka! meant death, instant,
Unknowing, or unfollowed by pain.
No one dares to light the third match.