Chris Mooney-Singh,
is the founder of Poetry Slam in Singapore and Programme Director of a literary arts company teaching poetry and performance in schools. Of Australian amd Irish descent, he adopted Sikhism in 1989.
He has also published four poetry collections, co-edited a poetry anthology—The Penguin Book of Christmas Poems—and has three spoken word CDs, the latest being Living in the Land of the Durian Eaters. Mooney-Singh also has poems published online at Mindfire, Cezanne’s Carrot, Stylus, Ghazalpage and Quarterly Review of Literature, Singapore (QRLS).
He was a guest at the Austin International Poetry Festival, 2003 and the Hong Kong Writer’s Festival, 2004.
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Yatra
You have come to lure me
from my white-robed life
in a marble sanctuary.
Your mum and a girlfriend
are here for a temple tour,
a yatra—yet, at this hour
they are night-flowers
nodding off among shadows.
We sit pressed together.
A new time has come
for jobs, deadlines, taxes.
My last letter’s in your bag,
its pages are ardent petals—
evidence of why you came
so far to meet me; and I—
a thief will snip your bloom.
My monastic stint is over.
Now we accelerate, veering
between the potholes
of a flawed Indian highway.
Love is a Tata Sumo—
this sturdy taxi bouncing
its headlights through
the wheat lands. We
count the mile markers:
time is rushing to harvest
as you agree to marry me.
Our driver slows behind a truck
painted with a lotus lake:
Krishna and the milkmaids—
are dancing in our headlights,
confirming that we dwell
on the same playful planet.
A temple is just a vehicle—
even a truck that belches diesel
down the pilgrims’ road.
Artist’s Statement
Recently I completed my last manuscript entitled The Laughing Buddha Cab Company, recently published here in Singapore. It deals with taxi window perspectives from urban and other settings—both Western and Eastern. It tries to depict both front seat and back seat points of view. When I thought I was done, my wife informed me rather tersely on reading the manuscript that there was one poem missing from the proposed collection—the one which recorded my proposal to her in 1999 in a hired taxi rushing through the Indian countryside.
Immediately, I realized she was very right and I was very wrong in missing this important last jigsaw piece of the collection. So commissioned, I quickly wrote the poem in the same straightforward narrative vein that had arisen as the dominant style throughout the writing: the book depicts taxis and other modes of transport in five locations—Singapore, Australia, USA, UK, India and then home again to Singapore. The poems are not just travelogues of the scenery but aim to draw portraits of the travelers—both drivers and passengers—their lives in capsule form during brief encounters, short rides. It is no coincidence I now realize that hiring a cab is like embarking on the reading of a brief poem and a collection of such poems can form a discontinuous, yet longer (and I hope) interesting narrative.
The poem does confirm a certain fascination I have for the use of narrative in poetry. Prose has may have displaced storytelling as a leading poetic genre long ago, however, in a brief poem like this I would like to believe that I have regained a little lost ground and that it may lead me onto other works and books in the future. Through the writing of this poem I also revisited a true and happy turning point in my life. It did indeed happen in a taxi. Fortunately, I have a loving partner who had the insight to point that out.
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