Five poems by Jerrold Yam

Portrait of 1965 (I)

All our shoes were kept inside on Thursdays.
Even slippers bartered from my brothers,
creased as upturned palms, were detained
in Grandma’s mahogany cabinet. Sometimes
there would still be lights in the neighbourhood
when they came, a flurry of footsteps like
a child’s impatient antics. I could feel
their eyes scouring banana leaf and rattan mats
before each household, and where
a careless wife had left her clogs outside
they would enter, lifting her out of sleep
and on their shoulders like angels, carrying
her to a field of lalang where the night winds
drowned out any smatterings of resistance,
where no husband, by dawn’s faithful arrival,
could deny the script of her torn sarong.

Portrait of 1965 (II)

The first time we sang the Japanese anthem
I knew teachers were not so different from us,
arms astute as masts, their fists like anchors
bound to the shivering air. Some of the
sepak takraw boys refused to recognise
the flag of our new masters, its plump
crimson circle like an eye waiting to
catch any misbehaviour. When the ordeal
was over, teachers mumbled to themselves
as if trying to get rid of the words, Kimigayo,
Syonanto, tiredly gravelling over their tongues.
Like rules from another game of marbles
we soon had it memorised, and before long
there was no need for any other lyric.

Portrait of 1965 (III)

What my mother saw
in the morning: two
mounds of sweet potato
losing themselves to air,
yam leaves unfurled
and oblivious, everything
that mattered still doused
in sleep, and in the distant
fields, a quiet spool
of barbed wire
gentle as handwriting,
winking back the sun.

Portrait of 1965 (IV)

Years later the firing squad visited Grandma
and lay their fragrant gifts before the door
of her fading memory. Clad in musky green
like mould conquering the walls of our
underground bomb shelter, some honoured
with epaulettes and chrysanthemum badges,
brows gleaming with Kempeitai courage,
they loitered for hours in the sun
like stalks of wheat. Grandma refused
to let them in, her papery limbs
recalling where memory had failed,
hinting at compassions
which must not be indulged
even when she had gone.

Portrait of 1965 (V)

Hoisting buckets of water on each end
of a bamboo pole, her shoulders caking
like soil under fingernails, she did not
care for schoolboys mocking her
Guangdong accent or red bandana,
ambling between streets, perspiration
like a rash overcoming her forehead.
I watched how buildings sprouted
as Singapore grew more affluent,
towers littered across the horizon
like fragments of an altar, and when
the Samsui women of Tofu Street
disappeared, banished to yellowing
books in a library, no one believed
their precarious silhouettes wavering
in the distance, weathered faces
wet as freshly inked testimonies,
ignoring every schoolboy taunt
to build a nation that never
understood them as her own.