In Focus: Malaysian Poet, Wong Phui Nam

These are further examples of both form, style and content. To date, Wong Phui Nam remains a favourite poet of mine. His style, in my opinion, especially his description of the landscape carries such love that can only be compared to one of the earliest Indian poets to write in English - Rabindranath Tagore.

HOW THE HILLS ARE DISTANT

Even the film-makers will have to admit,
the Malay annals upon the people’s consciousness
would wash like the tide
piling jetsam upon the jetty steps,
you said, as the car hit
ninety, beetling into the obsessive shell
of a parched landscape. And K.L. hours behind.
Dodging the disappearances and appearances
of the road, the cradled ego growing blind
against the body’s chafing would hide
from the terrible squashing of the sun,
threshing in daydream played out in the street…
of the Capitan China, the one
who, befogged in private vision,
laid down his law and had his women,
drove through the town in his carriage and eight –
for our forefathers left much behind
bringing mostly, when they came, the body
to contend with, did not notice the landscape,
the nodding vacuity of a malformed head.

At year’s end, the sense of annunciation touched only
the windows of the solitary.
And at the garden party, the bishop,
between meeting the community’s leaders,
picked at his beard, thinking perhaps of his study,
colonnades… the cathedral town…
The Capitan’s horses go clip-clop,
passing like the breeze down the midnight streets.

Our conversation petering out… silences…
Daydreams settle into laterite and gibberish of vegetation,
which made nonsense of Saint Francis’ mission.
De Sequiera’s troops over the ridge
forgot the meaning of their Christ and King.
Under the flare of the sun’s declension
the hills ignited. We passed the region
of the dead, the circular descent of those
who died and had committed nothing.

Our room’s on the second floor.
I am rather tired after today;
I feel the darkness of Babylon at the door.

NOCTURNES AND BAGATELLES

The river grows harsh at the bend,
speech broken onto boulders, tears at root-ends
of strong reeds. A lizard moves 
and crawls in the mimosa 
which spread and trail leafless 
across the rough stones of my heart.  
This is not the season 
when the wind blows wet 
and in the night rumours of water fowl 
but of the lonely sun 
when anger withers on the stoney bank, 
its branches bare
against the sky that holds your absence.

by Wong Phui Nam

**Read more about Wong Phui Nam here