Shopping Cart
    items

      June 17, 2018DPRK – USHsien Min Toh

      DPRK
      US
      we have
      a chance
      to achieve
      a truly wonderful
      progressive
      result for
      north korea and
      the world
      yet it must be
      tempered
      because
      by acknowledging
      the other side
      we validate it
      has
      after all
      its own
      will
      underwhelming
      in the
      massive
      spotlight
      tool
      we shine
      upon
      collapse
      which
      makes this
      transparently
      a gamble
      with a
      knowledge
      nobel
      developed his
      peace prize on
      explosives
      the table
      we have set
      there
      deliberately
      weighs
      a timer
      a button to push
      how else
      shall we hope
      to burn
      our place
      in a history that
      survives
      admits that
      if none can
      better
      play the
      part
      charming men
      of valour
      whose handshakes
      must be worth
      so much
      more than the
      obscure
      paper
      truth
      of signatures

       

      from Poets Respond

      Hsien Min Toh

      “I am a Singaporean, and as you can imagine the coverage of the Trump-Kim summit here in Singapore has been at saturation levels. I’ve thus written a response to it in twin cinema, a poetic form originating in Singapore that presents a poem in two (or more) columns such that it is possible to read each column vertically as independent poems or to read horizontally across the columns. In this way the form enables a discourse between two conflicting points of view that come together to form a third, ambiguous position. Which seems to me to be what the summit was all about.”

       ↗