"santa semana", Jonathan Chan
take care of your books,
they catch the dust of your whimpers.
God is a cliché,
paring one soul and another.
someone says a rhyme is sublime,
they play tennis without a net.
read a poem about persimmons,
feel the minute sap your breath.
measure an acre of afternoon brightness,
on its edge the shiver of shade.
think of women in war years,
a dream, a bullet’s graze.
catch a whiff of sour,
compline in an underground bunker.
count a throng of refugees,
count a happy executioner.
imagine the rock of ships,
new life acrid on your breath.
remember the alabanza, the praise,
wish for a new mingling of mists.
sing a song of sickness,
two years awash in change.
melt the mint chip on your lips,
such delight, such shame.
the downpour catches the sleeves,
soaked through in a maundy mystery.
wrap your feet in a cloth,
pat the lightness before you sleep.
hear the thunder, then the dark abyss,
grasp the dust, grasp nakedness.
/ Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor. He was born in New York to Malaysian and South Korean parents, raised in Singapore, and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Read more at jonbcy.wordpress.com.
/ COMMENTARY
“How could I have predicted the responses to my two introductions of genuine Southeast Asian poetic forms: the Gurindam Prompt, based on 200-year-old moralistic Malay couplets, and the Thanbauk Prompt, exploring a versatile but oddly brief Burmese verse structure? Jonathan Chan, “Santa Semana”, weaves a hypnotic series of apparently disconnected sensations together, rendering the original conventions of the gurindam a distant echo within its spellbinding hermeticism.”