"Term 2, Day 1", Jerome Lim
Highlighter buses.
Lights of asphalt under rays:
neon in the bus.
(Joy thinks she did.)
At the gate, fewer
mothers are around this year.
Elsewhere, it is the season
for fathers, & of the folds:
slender, rising, coming.
ORIGINAL POEM
Highlighter-green buses. Traffic lights casually
humming the melody of asphalt mornings.
Under each bus-stop roof, rays sweep thousands
of yawning faces with schoolbags packed like
dumplings: calculators, chromebooks & for many
the shame of undone homework. One clutches a
neon-pink balloon in the vocabulary of friendship
as she squeezes gingerly onto the bloated bus
(she forgot Joyie thinks balloons are overrated,
but she did appreciate the gift still). At the gate
thirteen-year-olds bound confidently into school
like labradors; fewer mothers are perched around
this time of the year. We know it is monsoon
summer always, here. Elsewhere, it is the season
for viewing flowers. In Geography one dreams
of dimensions beyond the maps he stares at:
tawny meadows, the rural scent of clear air,
the gravitas of fold mountains & slender pines
rising gently like ribs. The staffroom is a dappled
stream of satisfied frustration as we rehearse
the usual names; each overly-happy chime marks
where time ends & begins. All across, cherry-red
ink begins to blossom on milk-white paper in
a trained image of spring. Mid-years are coming.
/ Jerome Lim is an educator. He has been published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Mays, and the Journal of Modern Literature, amongst others. Currently the managing editor of poetry.sg, he is the winner of the Ursula Wadey Memorial Prize (2018) and the Golden Point Award for Poetry (2021).
/ COMMENTARY
“Jerome Lim’s ‘Term 2, Day 1’ is the cleverest and perhaps most hopeful use of a prompt I’ve seen. Inviting his literature students to collectively cancel/edit a draft he wrote, he makes a case for SingPoWriMo itself as a community not just of poem generators but also of editors. The poem makes us consider the issue of authorship and how an artwork belongs or doesn’t belong to an artist. It reframes the way we think insight is transmitted from teacher to student(s)—googledoc natives perhaps more used to collaborative writing. And of course, it shows us how removal can be renewal.”
/ Q&A
What inspired you to write this poem?
Well, like the tragic Tang Dynasty Bureaucrat-Poet (archetype taken from a Facebook post on Oxfess titled 'The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Singaporean Students at Oxford'), I was trying to procrastinate in order to avoid chipping away at the HDB blocks of unmarked essays and approval-of-requirements drafts resident on my desk. Thought the initial piece seemed a bit bloated, so decided to bring it into class for the students to decide what to trim!
How has writing for SingPoWriMo impacted you as a poet?
I first started out in SingPoWriMo in 2015; it was an interesting social experiment, to say the least. Could a bunch of people write one or more poems per day for an entire month under Oulipian-style constraints and sometimes-sadistic senior moderators? Turns out, here in Singapore we're forever operating under some sort of out-of-bounds markers and unspoken rules anyway, so I guess it worked out fine. In fact, like every good civil servant, I was 'promoted' to a junior mod team leader for a few years—those were some of the most zany years of my life.
What would you say to someone thinking about taking part in the next SingPoWriMo?
Forget what you think A Poem is, or qualifies as. Use the opportunity to experiment as much as possible (the weirder the better) rather than chase ‘likes’ for that transient dopamine hit, and make new friends, poet or not! Poets are an endangered species in this country.