they loaded up the steel tonnage, the coal, the manufacture,

patched up weathered warships to defend taken territories,

from the great west to the rising east to the assimilated.

(out the dockyards, glistening watermelons—left to wither)

it crests and subducts in a continuous wave from river

to the straits; it being the ships that carry news of age-old tales

filled with substitutions, displacements: like olives for mangroves,

naval base for shipyard, or alliance for complicity.

if you trace the peninsular tip to the fourteenth century,

tear down the fishing village, tally up trade routes of futures

collapsing into singular pasts diverging into split

paths, (a bustling metropolis sleeps beneath—a broken

lineage to our present) it's the same same but different,

like tree for tree, plank for plank, dialect for language, tragedy

for lessons, diagnosed as false cognates, as two ships of theseus

where one's existence denies the other. impasse for blockade.

here, in the terrior (the seasalt smell of the soil's semangat)

hold dear the land of the people when you fell each keramat

tree to make space for prosperity one way or the other...

tell me, are those fruits still a luxury we cannot afford?

as for sembawang, semantics, semiotics, shipywards:

it's wayward, wayside, waylaid, when you get out of the way

to carve shapeshifting effigies on that waterfront shore;

oh it's remembrance, _________ and it lives— and lives— and lives!