Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

Provided me with a much needed distraction today.

I suppose in the end, the real reason I renamed this blog was because I realised that putting up one's own poetry required a special kind of courage which I did not possess.

In this time and place, I just want to be a reader of poetry and not a writer.

Today's piece amused me. I thought the images evoked were whimsical and not a little sad. Also, as I've discovered, I like poetry with animals in it. This poet ecapsulates the image of goldfish so well, and fantasizes about what could really be happening in their little bowl.

I won't reproduce it here mainly because I'm more than a little afraid of flouting copyright laws but also because I think more people should take the time, even online to go and read through journals like that. So the poem is here, and I hope others will enjoy it the way I did.

Then again this might also be brought on by an admission by a friend of mine that he hated and feared reading poetry in school. I understood then, the failure of our Singaporean system. That a product of one of the top high schools in our country is unable to read or appreciate poetry or good prose for that matter is heartbreaking.

I suppose the truth is that most people out there view poetry as something mystical or beyond their ability to understand. Just like most laymen find law a confusing morass of rules. I tried, when my sister was young to introduce poetry to her that was 'easy'. Poetry that was humourous and fun and generally fairly easy to understand.

But she ended hating lit as a subject in school anyway because she wound up with a teacher who made them memorize literary devices word for word.

Que sera sera

what will be, will be.