The Sea Remembers

Kim Cheng Boey, Portside Review, Issue 1

Just when you turn your back on it and give it up for lost, it starts to come back, tides sweeping in from the lost horizon, or maybe it is rising in you, the sea returning with its waves of remembering, its lilting cadences and lapping folds on the mossy, weedy sea-wall, the hum, the chugging of sampans and tongkangs, the stirring sea breeze and bracing salt air, the shifting chords of bronze light, all the missing places, faces and voices, the vanished years come rolling in on the incoming tide, the Marina Barrage disappeared by memory’s reverse sleight of hand, the sea roads open again to archipelagic echoes.

This stirring poem by Kim Cheng Boey about his late father and memory’s tidal pull also appears in Boey’s latest collection, The Singer and Other Poems. It can be read as a companion piece to the titular poem, 'The Singer', written in memory of his mother.