✨ Scrutiny
where is the rice bin...
Scrutiny
How far is your village
from the railway station?
Where is the rice bin
in your family home?
Who paid for your passage
to America?
Why must I answer
these questions?
When can I join my love
in the land of the free?
Why do I live
in a wooden building?
Why must I prove
that I am me?
—Teow Lim Goh
From Islanders, Conundrum Press, Copyright © 2016. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Joseph Duarte, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.
The poem accurately and well comments on the state of our country, where one can be detained for any reason or for no reason at all. The questions, of course, "prove" nothing - and that is the point.
The poem's style reminds me of poems one might meet in the legendary Kayak magazine edited and published by George Hitchcock inn the Sixties & Seventies. Good poem!