Wow! Election fever has hit our shores, and many people are attempting to ram many agendas – perceived or otherwise – down our throats.
Hence, I thought it’d be nice to also ram my literary agenda down everyone’s throat for everyone’s nutritional needs, by way of a poem that has the dubious honour of still being relevant in this day and age.
Watch this video first (click on this link if you can’t see the embedded video) for schema-building purposes before reading the poem:
Happy learning!
—
- Trawlers
By Alfian Sa’at
Come election time
we would see those vans
crowned with loudspeakers
like wind vanes-
with a supply of their own
hot air. Their mission:
to catapult slogans in four directions
and four official languages.
No child throws stones at it.
And old women chew their curses
like betel leaves, tangy, unspat.
Woe be the motorist
trapped behind the hearse-crawl
of the harbingers of “good years”.
Who says that lightning
never strikes twice at the same spot?
Here it comes again:
not so much a van as a trawler,
casting huge nets, not subtle hooks;
the only way one catches mouthless fish.
—
From: One Fierce Hour. Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998.
