6th Singapore Poetry Contest Results

We are very pleased to announce the results of the 6th Singapore Poetry Contest. Open to everyone who is NOT a Singaporean citizen, the annual contest seeks poems that use the word “Singapore” or its variants in a creative and significant way.

We received a total of 432 poems, 337 more poems than last year, so you can imagine that this year’s contest was much more competitive, with many strong entries. The poems came from 32 countries around the world, 11 more than last year. Nigeria leads with 159 entries, followed by the USA 74, India 29, the Philippines 28, the UK 23, Singapore 13, Zimbabwe 11, South Africa 9, Canada 8, Malaysia 7, Australia 5, Ireland 5, Pakistan 5, Cameroon 4, France 3, Malawi 3, Zambia 3, Bolivia 2, Ghana 2, Israel 2, Nepal 2, Thailand 2, Austria 1, Burkina Faso 1, Germany 1, Hong Kong 1, Kenya 1, Mexico 1, the Netherlands 1, Spain 1, Sri Lanka 1, and Switzerland 1.

First prize (USD100) goes to “City, Time Zone (GMT+8)” by Anannya Uberoi.

Second prize (USD50) goes to “Panthera leo: a short history” by Maggie Wang.

Third prize (USD20) goes to “Dithyramb to Wetness” by Iloh Onyekachi.

Congratulations to the winners! Enjoy their poems below. The Singapore Poetry Contest will return in May 2021.


First Prize

City, Time Zone (GMT+8)
by Anannya Uberoi

Take Madras, for example. You wake up in the groggy summer
to the tropical almond with its buttressed trunk spurting in its flakey leaves
through the hinges of your window formed with the same wood –

the tree is spreading the corners of its crown against the pale walls
of your room while your mother is making mango panna in the kitchen.

The tick of her spoon clunking against intricately detailed bone china
you bought on a family trip to Jakarta is metered to the clockwork's cycles
and tells you it will be time to ring your older brother in London in five.

You picture him at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich with a thick
moustache and hands burrowed in an Everett stretch double-breasted trench coat

under curdled rain that never ceases, dictating about the times of the world
as he works, night after night to keep up with a family of four in India,
a wife absent in space-time, and a little girl at university in the Far East.

She maintains her own discrete bedlam – Singapore has changed
time zones six times since 1905 and may switch once more at her command.

Now take, for example, the Asian koel that flies from the tropical sea almond
outside her window to the mango tree in your yard and rests mid-flight, cheated
of half an hour after half an hour throughout her journey to the half-browning leaf –

you like to think the bird bubbles into the airstream and ripples again
at its destination because it creates more spaces for you to reach out

to your brother despite the trouble with clocks. Now you are also thinking
of great white pelicans who are beginning to chart their eastward winter journeys
from his one-bedroom studio that only houses pictures of sycamores and sugar maples.

No cerise-laden branches grace the downpour of his glum days.


Judge’s comment: This beautiful poem makes vivid to our senses what is often talked about in abstraction, the transnational family, the transnational poem. The family may be scattered in Madras, London, and Singapore, but the leaves of an almond tree, the tick of a spoon, brings everyone together in the speaker’s sudden thought, in the fluent lines of this poem. The connections are elemental; subtly the suggestions of earth, fire, air, and water are made. The connections are man-made too, exemplified by the intricacy of bone china, the protection of the Everett double-breasted trench coat, the taste of mango panna. What makes the poem extraordinary is its accommodation, its acceptance, of the fact that despite its longed-for reunion, some member of the family, the niece, prefers “her own discrete bedlam” in a Singapore that keeps changing time zones and so stays out of reach. And out of reach too of the poem’s sympathies is the brother glumly working away, trying hard to repair lost time, a kind of reality principle that the poem denies for a span but ultimately acknowledges.

Anannya Uberoi is a full-time software engineer and part-time tea connoisseur based in Madrid. She is currently poetry editor at The Bookends Review and columnist at The Remnant Archive. She was nominated for Best of Net in 2020, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Birmingham Arts Journal, The Bangalore Review, The Loch Raven Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal. www.anannyauberoi.com


Second Prize

Panthera leo: a short history
by Maggie Wang

i.
imagine the torchlight flaring up again
from the marks on the walls and the paintings
coming alive as Clottes whispers to himself—
wonders about the people who made these drawings:
if they had names, and where they saw the lions
they drew, and how close they came to them
across what would have been wide grasslands,
and if all those who entered this cave
afterwards—the bears and their still-living prey,
the child and the wolf just tamed,
saw these paintings and asked the same questions.

ii.
imagine Ishtar, standing atop the lion’s back,
spears hanging from her shoulders, a dove resting
on her wrist or lifting off into the sun—Ishtar,
who watches the traders and the supplicants
passing through her gate, and who, though silent,
speaks, first through the lion as it
cries out in triumph and its cry echoes across
the desert, then through the man at the lion’s feet—
the man whose pleas for mercy, mercy, mercy
go unanswered because to answer them is to forget
how she promised him he would find mercy in his pain.

iii.
imagine the fawn leaping from between the
still-bare trees and Horatius, looking on, remembering
the girl from the market—how she hid
behind her mother’s tunic, which billowed in the wind,
but not enough to hide the golden ends of her hair
from the sunlight or from his gaze—how even he,
who claimed he would not pursue her to break her
or tear her apart like the beasts he has seen
in other groves, thought he would bloom
in the heat of the chase and imagined his blood
turning to gold or water in search of her touch.

iv.
imagine Singapore, lion city, so called because
a Srivijayan prince once thought he saw a lion
on its shore—a good omen, his chief minister
told him, and because he wanted to, he believed him—
so he told his sons, and so his men told their sons,
though lions had never lived on that island,
and if the prince ever wondered why he never
saw that beast again, his doubts are lost to history,
swept out to sea by the cadence of the tides,
melted away into the sultry island air, dispersed
by the winds like ash at the burning of a forest.


Judge’s comment: The biggest danger in writing a historical poem is that the research may outweigh the poetry. This danger Maggie Wang avoids adroitly through the lightness of her touch, the attentiveness of her language (to hide, not her hair, but “the golden ends of her hair/ from the sunlight or from his gaze.”), and, most vitally, her understanding of human passions. Each of the four sections shines a light—from the revived torch drawn on cave wall—on a different passion: intellectual curiosity, love of power, erotic desire, the will to believe and bequeath. Writing a poem in sections presents its own challenges, a great one being the need to write, not one, but multiple endings. The poem lands every one of its endings with panache and insight and, for good measure, concludes that the torch of human curiosity often leads to the tragic destruction of our environment, “the burning of a forest.”

Maggie Wang is an undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Her writing has appeared or will appear in K'in, Ruminate, Shards, The Literary Nest, and Rigorous, among others. She has also won awards from the Poetry Society and the Folger Shakespeare Library. When not writing, she enjoys playing the piano and exploring nature.


Third Prize

Dithyramb To Wetness
by Iloh Onyekachi

In the eyes of my mother,
every land of many feet is Hong-kong or New York
& I do not blame her, for cities are places where people
leave their dreams on the sidewalk & keep walking—
without looking back, without flinching, without the
slow-walk associated with loss or the penance for having
lost. Before I leave, she writes a prayer on the pages
of my heart, another one in my bag—in the little
compartment meant for headphones, & another
on her own heart so when she pulls it like a tongue seeking
from another tongue, the secret of rivers, the one in my
heart jumps like a sentry caught sleeping.
Warble by warble, a stream learns the music of the ocean
learns the way of raging water. Walks the way of wetness.
In the eyes of my mother, there are seas crashing against
the reef, breaking a rotten boat to pieces, calling a son back home
through walls of water. I take out my mother’s prayers,
word after word, place them on a string, make me a necklace
of supplications, say a litany to rain and hope it finds me
in a place where there are no pillars, where there are no roofs,
where there are no bats hanging from the rafters,
where there are no rafters, where there is a pathway
to stars. In the eyes of mother, every land of many feet is
Singapore, Lagos, Enugu or London. In my eyes, cities
are places where we pray the rain finds us in a field full of hibiscuses,
spread-eagled, awaiting the lynching of light, hoping all the prayers
left on the sidewalk end up here as fireflies.


Judge’s comment: The wonder of “Dithyramb to Wetness” is that it move so fluidly, so musically, enfolding a previous line into the next, “warble by warble,” so that even near-sentimental references to heart and stars are swept up in its rhythm, and surprisingly original images (the headphone compartment, the sentry caught sleeping) flash momentarily and then are left behind. After the mournful outpouring of the poem, the conclusion may strike us as unexpectedly violent, before we remember that the poem is a dithyramb, an Ancient Greek hymn to Dionysius, the god of drunken frenzies and sexual orgies. The city—whether it is New York, Singapore, or Lagos—is a violent place, to which we travel for the ecstasy of being torn apart.

Iloh Onyekachi is a writer and visual artist from Nigeria who believes in art as a weapon of revolution. When he isn't playing pretend guitar or dancing before mirrors, he reads poetry or mourns his country. He occasionally rants on mutemusings.home.blog and watches the world from the sidelines @demigodly_kachi

Uncut grass during the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore, 2020. Photograph by Tan Pin Pin. Used with permission.