In the Turning

In the Turning

Christian Yeo

For Easter

On the day that I come face to face with
the conductor of life Himself, I should ask
Him only why rivers run further than men.

I would like to pry open the trees that
line the banks, ask them what they think of
ducks whose feet run along their shores.

Whose love runs from a place of
lack? If only elegies could fill the space
once held by melodic archways; beneath
the roots of this feathered grass, only the
soil from which shadows seep.

I would like to press their fault lines,
steal the petals of flowers once more seen.
(Little soldiers again begun to blossom)
Feel the contours of my palms line up
perilously distant from the ways the earth
shakes in defiant entropy. Slender line of
grass journeys alongside, browning at
the edges, coming apart easily, at the

seams. Which spaces between stories
beckon for interpretation? We all await
the time when rivers pack up their boxes,
trailing without controversy to
sorrowful endings. Run in parallel,
navigate the concentrism running rings
around inner topography. That I should have
stopped in this journey, I barter in exchange
for the seedlings, the flower streams of spring.

In love that I have for the Maker (and He for
me), only He and I should know why after
so much time has passed, it can only be so.

---

Christian Yeo
Writer & Human Rights Student

Christian is a Singaporean law undergraduate from the University of Cambridge. His work has been published in the Eunoia Review, the jfa human rights journal, 6'98's Redefinitions, Ethos Books' This is not a safety barrier, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, ZETEO Magazine, and the Creative Arts Programme 30-year Commemorative Publication; it is forthcoming in Notes Publication, and won him the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize in 2019. He live in the United Kingdom.

Photography by Zhao Chen