in Africa + ..., poems by edwin thumboo (singapore)
TENGGARA 2 / 1968
Dept.of English-Univ.of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur/ Malaysia.
EDWIN THUMBOO'S POEMS
In Africa
This airport is nicely rural
But it grows and will get up-to-date
This landing trip where kites circle for prey.
Unlock the sky,
This scar in the earth to which night comes
When glow worms fly,
Will soon to be better lit.
The country's flag is new
Unfurled just modestly.
An old colonial cannon sits
Just quietly.
But hear the trucks and tractors, busy with the earth
Pushing the trees quite out of sight,
Dismantle the frame of land
The green -ref flowers.
There a nocturnal lizard finds a sudden day,
Moves unnaturally, glaring at the sun,
Displaced into the century.
Proposal
General speaking, we can allow
That marriages are made in Heaven,
For better or for worse,
But whatever the heavenly reason
Proposals are uttered here on earth,
Some seriously, some out of season
When the flower is lost,
The tree heavy with fruit,
Others to mend ordinary lives .
To put it simply
A man proposes, the farther disposes.
So a clever girl will say :
" Speak to my father. "
But proposing ta a father
Fat and fifty,
In his comfortable rocking-chair,
For his daughter's hand ,
Soft and twenty, skin-creamed, perfumed,
Into quiet perfection ...
But proposig to a father
Is never easy,
Espescially if you are in love
And he proposal-prone,
Having married three daughters off.
The young man with a proposak in his head,
When he is lest his bachelor self,
Drops to see the family,
Suffering in sense of vague finality,
Choosing a simple, uncongested evening,
When she , the object of his hand and heart
Is away at the Annual General Meeting of
Her Old Girls Association.
The family gathers --- father, mother,
Brothers, sisters, a few sly neighbours,
All curiously aware
Of the anxious visitor,
The happy casualty,
Who fidgets, moves his chair,
Looks almost sacrifical,
Wonders if he should comb his hair,
Or cough nonchalantly or stare
At his unpolished shoes.
Dinner is served, then tucked away
Politely. The father-image moves
Across the hall , into the verandah.
The frangipani is in bloom.
They smell sweet and he remembers
He has come to make proposal ... about the weather,
The heavy traffic at Newton Circus,
Mumbling ' I want to marry our daughter .'
His never slips a notch or two, but no matter,
The father-image understands,
Approves the nervouness,
Steers the evening, the scent of bloom,
The stars, one corner of the rising moon,
Into the practicalities or civil, then listing
Matters on which there could be compromise.
It is soon over and the marriage is made in Heaven.
When you are old and
Fat and fifty, comfortable in a rocking-chair
Remember it is never easy to propose .
edwin thumboo
( TENGGARA 2 / 1968 - p . 68- 69 )
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