as above, so below
Singapore
2024, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
as above, so below (1)
the sun swells above
like a stye-eye.
there are holes in the sky, leaking starlight.
it is in these bleeding, dying constellations
that humanity’s fate is written.
the sound of fire is a crackling hiss:
consume, consume.
man’s hands warm over burning, hot-red coals;
the smoke burns small holes into the sky
like little dead stars.
consider even the polished gravestones,
so polished light gleams off
like water rushing down the river.
the twisted grass turns to dry earth below the swollen sun-pupil.
consider the sun scorched earth,
the grass yellowed around the guāncai (2)
like a copse of yellowing thin thicket.
yes, even what’s buried will burn.
the sky is in tatters.
what is a star without light? what is humanity without life?
witness the sun, swollen and swelling more yet,
consuming even the lily-white júhuā (3) left from qīngmíng (4).
consuming even the fruit left at the grave, turning it to rot.
as man walks the length of the coast,
soft winds dapple at his silks.
sun-warmed sand sticks to his toes.
beneath, where his feet meet the earth?
splotches of redness: blistering sunburns
breaking painfully every step of the way.
what is humanity to the swollen sun
that knows only to consume?
cracked asphalt, blistering skin;
through the tatters in the sky, the sun-glare
is burning life into ash.
as above, so below.
(1) A popular modern paraphrase of the second verse of the Emerald Tablet; it means what happens in a higher realm affects what happens in a lower realm
(2) Gravestone
(3) Chrysanthemum
(4) Tomb-Sweeping Day
Reflection
As I live in Singapore, which is an island country close to the equator, heat is part and parcel of everyday life. However, as time passes, the heat has increasingly become a greater issue as it is getting hotter and hotter due to global warming (i.e. climate change). It’s impossible to ignore; that’s how pervasive it is. I've experienced firsthand how rising temperatures make our environment increasingly inhospitable, so heat (global warming) ended up being the specific impact of climate change that my poem ended up centering around. However, from my experience, most people are already aware of global warming/climate change; in fact, it’s so familiar to them that it’s become white noise and thus, people have become complacent. Thus, I had to be careful to present something that wouldn’t be dismissed immediately as a ‘cliché’, which would obviously hinder the desired impact of provoking concern in the reader. I abstracted how the greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels destroy the ozone layer into “man’s hands warm over burning, hot-red coals; / the smoke burns small holes into the sky / like little dead stars.” which does not explicitly state the science, but still evokes a sense of unease with enough implied link to the scientific explanation that the reader is aware of the link to burning fossil fuels without it being overtly obvious and hence ‘cliché’. Overall, I wanted to portray global warming abstractly enough so that it would evoke emotion in even the most jaded reader, and tie in just enough unsettling imageries to convey the urgency and severity of global warming.