The Planners
Boey Kim Cheng * Track #15 On Songs of Ourselves
Download "The Planners"
Album Songs of Ourselves
- #1Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
- #2One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
- #3Song: Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
- #4My Parents
Stephen Spender
- #5For Heidi With Blue Hair
Fleur Adcock
- #6Praise Song for My Mother
Grace Nichols
- #7Elegy for My Father’s Father
James K. Baxter
- #8The Trees Are Down
Charlotte Mew
- #9Attack
Siegfried Sassoon
- #10Reservist
Boey Kim Cheng
- #11Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
- #12Friend
Hone Tuwhare
- #13Horses
Edwin Muir
- #14The Planners
Boey Kim Cheng
- #15A Mind Content
Robert Greene (1560-92)
The Planners by Boey Kim Cheng
Performed by
Boey Kim ChengAbout
Kim Boey Cheng is a Singaporean-Australian poet and now professor of creative writing at an Australian university. The poem relates to his time as a boy growing up in a rapidly modernising Singaporean society.
‘The Planners’ reflects the dramatic changes and how Singapore’s past culture was — as t...
The Planners Annotated
They plan. They build. All spaces are gridded,
filled with permutations of possibilities.
The buildings are in alignment with the roads
which meet at desired points
linked by bridges all hang
in the grace of mathematics.
They build and will not stop.
Even the sea draws back
and the skies surrender.
They erase the flaws,
the blemishes of the past, knock off
useless blocks with dental dexterity.
All gaps are plugged
with gleaming gold.
The country wears perfect rows
of shining teeth.
Anaesthesia, amnesia, hypnosis.
They have the means.
They have it all so it will not hurt,
so history is new again.
The piling will not stop.
The drilling goes right through
the fossils of last century
But my heart would not bleed
poetry. Not a single drop
to stain the blueprint
of our past's tomorrow.