The Green Corridor Poems by RGS Inkspiration
During The Green Corridor Forum, four students from the Raffles Girls’ School’s Inkspiration writing group shared their excellent poems. Here are the poems, enjoy!
The Planks
by Ho Ting En
Of history;
Of memories;
That carried years and years on their backs.
Lying sadly, forlornly, dejectedly
By the tracks
That are also forgotten and hidden.
Extending into the future,
Trailing into the past,
Walking in the present,
The planks were well used
But they are abandoned now.
They Say It Was Rain
by Sandra Chong
It had been pouring before we got there—
ribbons of harsh damp incandescent silver streaking
across the sky.
They say it was rain, not
the weeping of the boundless blue beyond
as it thundered and shuddered and cracked open.
See, the blades of grass tremble under the weight of its sorrow.
They point out the birds to us—
they cannot stay on the ground for long, and so
to return in flocks to heights where the air still shimmers.
They call them by names too odd and long, as if
they did not already have names before we knew them,
perfect and incomprehensible syllables that dictate their right to the earth.
See, they know they have a right to this earth.
And all this while—
All above our heads—all beneath our feet—
The tremor still shakes us to our very core
As the phantom train hurtles along a phantom track
As Nature goes about her unknown ways
As the sky continues the sob as the birds continue to call
Just as they have always done.
Vignettes of What Once Was
by Cai Xiaohan
i.
Some say that the kingfisher’s feathers
are the iridescent blue of a burning flame,
as its wings tilt to catch the light.
That day, we saw those fire-feathers
a-light on the broken railway:
they flickered, and the worm-worn wood
blazed with the beauty of that single moment.
ii.
There stands two trees.
Their branches grasp and clutch each other,
reaching over the once-was-railway.
Look, he says, this is a photo frame.
And he splays himself in the space between.
Many years later, years after he had left,
this same photo curls between my fingers.
I look again:
It is as if the absence between the trees
had been waiting for someone to fill it up again.
Long Live Nature
by Dominique Yong
The rain splashed hard as time elapsed
Sunbeams glaring on the tracks
They’d left their marks for memory’s sake
Their motifs left etched in their wake
By and by the old wood crumbled
Loose bits of bolts heaped in a jumble
Little weeds began to sprout
Between the cracks and inside and out
Its sylvan roots were burrowing deep
New pips of growth begin to seed
First one tree, and then another
Scatters of leaves after a shower
The vines crept ‘round the railroad track
Like a skin upon a rack
Little bushes sprung up beside
Creepy crawlies hid inside
Nature has returned and reigns
It seems that Man has been won against
But at night if hard your ears you strain
You may hear a phantom ghost train
Source credit: RGS Inkspiration
