Songs of my father by Sandra Tan

It has been almost half my life

Since I last saw you

Over tea, in the large mall downtown

Where you told me that China has ring roads

The size of entire cities

When I got married two years ago

I received no sign from you

Perhaps the wind was unable to carry

The news to wherever you were,

In one such city encircled by a road

Today, someone yelled at me

It was a quiet kind of yelling

Moderate words of disapproval,

Loaded silences

I thought of you, in the house

How quiet you were

Because you were there

I did not know to search for signs of life

The thin melody from your room

Where you played a Bach CD at night,

The yellowing light

Wrapping us to sleep

How I would lie down in the long afternoons

Staring at my pink Garfield bedspread,

Feeling the sun fall onto

And pass right through me

I cannot believe

That your words were bereft of meaning

Surely something there

Could be panned

For the tiniest bright stone

To hold close at night

Like in this moment

When someone is yelling at me, quietly

The way your silence is a reproach

Each year layering over the next

For the longest time I did not know how

To spell what was missing,

Or to recognise longing

Which I accepted easily, the way children

Accept the facts of science –

This solid earth, this yellow sun

That shows up each morning

Then for the longest time

I knew I was only half of myself,

Wrapped in a tall coat

Once, a cactus spike got lodged in my finger

We were in an old, open-air mall

You went from shop to shop to borrow

A pair of nail clippers

I did not even remember the pain

Of removal

The instant of loss

Only that you must have held my (then) small hand

Still in your large ones

As you turned it this way and that

To gently prise out the thorn

From the soft pad of my finger.

__________

Sandra Tan is a poet from Singapore. Her poetry has appeared in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, The Oxonian Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Kindling, and Eastlit. She was a finalist for the 2025 Ninth Letter Literary Awards, longlisted for the 2024 National Poetry Competition (The Poetry Society), and nominated for the 2024 Panorama Prize