BROWSE Columns
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that she should bid the clay and plaster sing:
the chorus, draped in gowns, by height ascending,
their faces warm with personal abandon,
that find their windows with each vital breath,
the hotter notes that brush another’s neck,
that soar in crests and troughs with divine splendour
that warbling, so deep with measured feeling,
their lips so shaped with stony ecstasy.
and while their voices find an unseen player,
who makes each declaration bend and waver,
she places each of them inside his hand,
a palm that’s big enough to bid them stand,
and at the edge before with sheet and paper,
a kneeling figure, vanishing in prayer.
Jonathan Chan is a freelance writer and recent graduate of the University of Cambridge. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and human expression.
