Law. Faith. Justice. Community. Culture.
Have you ever had to facilitate a group discussion? It could be a work brainstorming meeting, focus group or accountability small group.
Every so often, we may find that the discussion is veering off course or losing steam, some voices drown others out, ideas or content get stale, or things get heated.
Here are some tools and techniques to help facilitate group discussions.
29 December 2014
Bodies somersault in silent currents;
dancers and stumblers separate in rhythm.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Nimble winds weave around falling metal,
separating head from tail, wings from body.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Heads drop like fresh fruit fallen on damp fields;
knives, like seasons, separate ripe from unripe.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Stray cells burst out all around like spring bloom,
separating the faint hearts of lovers.
And there was evening and there was morning.
The conquered echo hymns of foreign gods;
words separate the trembling from the inert.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Crusts of earth unclasp their quiescent hands,
separating flesh from dust and dry bones.
And there was evening and there was morning.
Pure light gilds new trees by ancient rivers,
separating never from forever.
And there was evening, the final evening.
And there is morning.
1 December 2019
How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Psalm 13:1-2
I’m the traveller waiting in transit,
whose flight is not yet fixed or known to him,
in a foreign land whose food he now eats,
whose language he now speaks fluently in.
The boarding time—that’s still a mystery,
but the retail offers make up for it,
and the cheap spa’s soothing soul therapy,
one would give up checking every minute.
Crowds or jostling bother not much longer
than the dated movies showing on screen,
so other travellers ‘round drinks gather,
forget the land they were meant to be in:
the land of ancestors and native tongues,
of healing and soulful songs to be sung.
“Hallelujah people lai liao!*”:
lanterns lit our path into a house of—God
have mercy—sex, flesh hiding beneath
frail smiles, our offers of cookies and prayer.
.
A dark-skinned girl wearing
a cross, which I could not bear
to look, reached for us; we embraced
her in a cocoon of indistinguishable bodies.
.
Clasped hands catching crumbs
of lost words and bowed heads
sculpted petitions to our Father. Amen,
we said, a thousand questions
.
unspoken among us,
each struggling to soar, to find a home
where every answer burns
a gentle fire to light up a long, long night.
.
* “lai liao”: literally come already in Chinese
Hunched, with a cane, under whipping echoes
of foreign men’s curses, he half-squatted, half-
sat pregnant with, heaving, a chest-full lifetime of
lies slipping through the shackles of his blank gaze;
on his trembling lap sits his children’s hopes
crafted in Hindi on generic postcards; one falls
onto his scabbed foot swollen from the earth’s
protestations against his lot – his only worth.
Published in SINGPOWRIMO:THE ANTHOLOGY, edited by Ann Ang, Joshua Ip and Pooja Nansi, Math Paper Press (2014)
9 November 2014
.
Your daughter feeds you. Baby
spoon lingers on pale lips, like
a question, I imagine, drifting
at the edge of your memory
.
as you search for me there–
a letter without a word,
folding, never touching itself–
aimlessly. The Elder gestures
.
for me to hold your hand.
I feel your dry skin open,
swallowing the wavering
unfamiliarity between us
.
as we pray. Our eyes are closed:
I am comforted by their shadows,
where distance is immeasurable.
You do not know me, or I,
.
you, who are related
only by the name
by which our pleas coalesce
then dissipate like vapour.
.
As the last of the Elder’s
words journey towards their destination,
I look up. Your eyes light up
as we say together, amen.
Sometimes
I have loved
the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing
in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel
the silent and invisible life.
Any human face
is a claim on you, because
you can’t help but understand
the singularity of it,
the courage and loneliness of it.
But this is truest of the face of an infant.
I consider that to be one kind of vision,
as mystical as any. Love is
holy because it is like grace–
the worthiness of its object is never
really what matters.
There is no justice
in love, no proportion in it,
and there need not be,
because in any specific instance it is
only a glimpse or parable
of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.
It makes no sense at all
because it is the eternal breaking in
on the temporal. So how could it
subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
There are a thousand thousand reasons
to live this life,
everyone of them sufficient.
Grace has a grand laughter in it.
There’s so much to be grateful for,
words are poor things.
Published in SingPoWriMo 2016: The Anthology (Math Paper Press: 2016)
Review of Netflix’s The Sandman: The Power of Story
Netflix’s “The Sandman” is a dark fantasy series adapted from the cult-hit graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman and published by DC Comics’s Vertigo from 1989 to 1996.
I read the graphic novel in secondary school and was taken in by the vastness of Gaiman’s vision in upending various comic and literary genres to tell a metafiction of myths, legends and fictions. Gaiman drew from the Bible (Lucifer, Cain & Abel and God’s angels make significant appearances in the series), Greek and Norse myths, European, Asian and Islamic folk-tales, as well as Shakespeare, Dante, Blake, Milton and the likes.
Continue reading “Review of Netflix’s The Sandman: The Power of Story “
Silver river softly rolled, its winding passages
charted on atlases of green veins rising
under tanned skin wrapped over forearms
of men rowing on slivers of sampans
Chinese farmers with their poultry and pigs,
Malay fishermen who have delicately drawn
from provisions of the generous sea, and
between them, a sacred distance of fellowship
Past chapels from which soulful voices rise
heavenward and fall clumsily on zinc roofs
of quiet neighbours like grey singlets slipping
from laundry lines onto a bed of dried leaves;
Beside Babujan Zoo, where the Bengal tiger
wistfully watched the water, wishing,
perhaps, it could drift away, off the edge
of the story of a land, which idly bided
at the tip of a long road paved with loss,
overrun by men on bicycles, chanting
foreign anthems of liberation, lips longing for
their wives and children, which shall soon cease
to give life, but open wide its mouth to catch
the felled, where the river will no longer
carry the wishes of a people who
shall soon be called by a different name.
—
This poem is featured in Punggol Regional Library’s Words That Move animated digital showcase at its launch in 2023.
This poem was featured in Singapore Poetry On The Sidewalks in 2019.
It was also used in this collage work by Lidya Kamal, 3rd year Art & Design student, Glasgow School Of Art Singapore
