Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2021: Artist’s Choice

Image: “The Blood in the Veins” by Rachel Slotnick. “Revelations” was written by Sean Wang for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2021, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

__________

Sean Wang

REVELATIONS

When she left she was already shadow,

the jet black smudge of history

blurred by the cataracts of 93 years

(or 95, my father said people lied

to immigration, when a year could mean a lifetime

lost). She had a joy

burning through paper skin and bamboo bones like a lantern.

Her cold hands covered in brown spots like an overripe banana.

She was fixed to her bed

by a pair of bad legs and a crinkled back.

Some nights her favourite operas and fried noodles

would only gather the flutter of an eye

and she would recede back, back into some past

purring in her head like the tumble of a washing machine.

It would get quieter, just the ticking of the fan

spinning above, time whirring through air.

She woke/slept, a dusk of days.

The last 5 years flickered train-like,

the sleek pulses of blinkers,

a throbbing twilight of fireflies.

Her train had left, and I stood waiting

at the station, the track gaping through the ground

swallowed by the wall, a denture-less mouth.

But I remember when

the room was bouncing with pitchy singing,

the kitchen burning with spices and bossy orders,

and you, the voice and echo.

I believe, in those days where you would stare

at the ceiling, the glazed eye of a fish in ice,

you were seeing

some slice of heaven spread before you,

the pocket of sky you wait in.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
September 2021, Artist’s Choice

__________

Comment from the artist, Rachel Slotnick: “After reading ‘Revelations,’ I couldn’t shake its spell. It peers through the eyes of the dying in a way that confronts the limitations of living. Here on earth, we look up at the stars and long for there to be a heaven. This poem speaks to the loneliness too many of us have known in the hospice room. It pinpoints the ache of outliving someone, of being left behind, and being tasked with remembering.”

Sean Wang

TESTING

I first learnt about the world in shapes:

a ball is a circle, is a sun, is an earth

and a square is a chair, is a window, is a tile.

Then I moved to colours:

green for grass, red for fire, blue for water

and the sky, white for clouds and black

for the night and its ashes.

Then it was words:

stringing vowels like a train

rumbling through the tracks of my throat

in clean whistles and garbled blares.

Letters, the dance of the crayon and the breath

of ink, spinning in patterns like a snowflake.

But numbers:

words which now had no thing,

but rather a multitude of things, hinging

onto its curves like a curious hook

and they could move amongst themselves

in a forest of symbols, rustling in deep

cover, and emerge a fawn, a doe, or a deer.

Growing up is learning to say things better.

Ever since I was born

I knew I liked strawberries, their sour-sweet buzz,

even before I saw its sun pith rising in crimson dawn.

My babbles would have been much less convincing.

What no one told me

is how empty it would be when you had nothing to say,

when your inadequacy stares at you wide-mouthed and blank

white, an unanswered question on a test

running from your desperate pen,

grief you cannot explain away,

the sadness that returns night after night,

as the sun lowers itself into a hole

and the sea reclaims its land.

When it was you and your failure

in a room, face to face, a reflection

and a breaking shadow,

a deaf god and his silent stars.

Now, how could I put this into shapes, colours, words or numbers?

How lonely, how devastating,

how adult.

—from Poets Respond
October 10, 2021

__________

Sean Wang: “In Singapore, we are infamous for our rigorous national exams, born out of a strict Asian culture that places an emphasis on academic excellence. One of our key exams is the PSLE, taken by students at 12 years old and holds the power to determine, in essence, the course of their lives. Reading about the recent outcry regarding the difficulty of such exams in the time of a pandemic, it made me reflect on my own personal experience. For me, these exams were the first time I realised that I was in many ways, average and unexceptional. I think coming to terms with my inadequacy was one of the first steps I took towards adulthood, and a struggle I continue with today.”

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

Sean Wang

October 21, 2021

Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2021: Artist’s Choice

October 10, 2021