Sook Ching (on Changi Beach)

(The Sook Ching -- literally "purge through cleansing" -- was the massacre of Chinese people deemed to be hostile by the Japanese during WW2. We stood on Changi beach, and the guide told us the story of one such massacre, where the men were forced to wade into the sea in rows, where they were shot down. )

And the waves wash, grey and salt,

Salt and grey.

The time of terror,

Prejudice spinning,

Wild, uncontrolled,

The desperate nightmare,

Of a world that lost its bearings,

Lost its axis,

Twisting, like a child’s top,

Madly down the road.

And the waves wash, grey and salt,

Salt and grey.

Picture it now,

The juggernaut of hate,

Bearing down, crushing life, crushing hope,

Men in mad scramble

To gather up their splintered selves again:

Blank with horror

For the waste of it,

The bitter, pointless waste.

And the waves wash, grey and salt,

Salt and grey.

There is no sense in violence,

Cold calculation

Has married raging hate

This is the fruit,

Dark, damned and fruitless fruit.

The devil’s arithmetic

Gambles with lives – one here, another there,

Another overlooked.

And the waves wash, grey and salt,

Salt and grey

They marched into the sea,

They had no choice

(The guns, the bayonets)

Herded and helpless,

Oh, what was the point?

(The pointless, pathless point,

Pathetically profound)

To stand, to stand,

Unsteady in the waves

(The waves of water, and the waves of fire)

Blindly reduced to bodies in the sea.

And the waves wash, grey and salt,

Salt and grey

And we, with tears, now stand on that same beach.

We hear the story, and we hear the waves

The waves of water and of history,

The bitter waters of our broken race.

And, see, no sun is breaking through the clouds,

The dark and looming clouds.

We each, alone,

In the primeval loneliness of man,

Must face again the dark without, within.

Must learn again to know and not pretend,

Deny the facile answer, programmed verse

With which we seek to flee our human shame;

And face again our coward lovelessness,

Till our numb lips can shape a holier name.

And the waves wash, grey and salt,

Salt and grey

Till there is no more sea.