The Season of Drained Earth

 

 

"The Season of Drained Earth" is a literary meditation on a decade of transboundary haze in Singapore, capturing the smoldering peat of Sumatra and Kalimantan, the shifting rhythms of the monsoons, and the island city veiled beneath ash.

The Season of Drained Earth

Beneath the wet meridian, the soil is made of memory—
a thousand winters of dead leaves, pressed dark into the mire,
sleeping in the waterlogged cradles of Riau and Borneo,
until the drainage canals drink them dry.

When the warm pool slides east and the Pacific turns its face,
the drought arrives like an unsigned decree.
A match dropped in the brushwood does not simply burn:
it burrows. It roots downward into peat,
igniting subterranean veins that breathe without flame,
whispering smoke through the porous floor of the archipelago.

Then the southern monsoon lifts its heavy lung.
Over the gray skin of the Malacca Strait,
over the barge paths and the mangrove shallows,
it drives the slow, ochre curtain north.

We mark the calendar by the dimming of our towers.
The glass spines of Marina Bay dissolve into milk and cinder;
the sun hangs at noon like a rusted copper coin,
stripped of heat, casting shadows without edges.
In our pockets, the numbers rise like mercury:
twenty-four hours of numbers, twenty-four hours of breath,
one-zero-one, two-hundred, the crossing of thresholds
where the air becomes an arithmetic of caution.

How quickly the body learns the taste of burnt timber:
the sharp tang of sulfur caught behind the teeth,
the tight ring of the N95 mask against the cheek,
the hum of HEPA filters turning in quiet bedrooms
like prayer wheels spinning against the invisible dust.

For a few seasons, the rains granted reprieve—
three long years of La Niña, wild downpours drumming the zinc roofs,
flooding the trenches, holding the subterranean fire hostage
beneath swollen rivers and drowning roots.
We forgot the smell of singed palm; we mistook the wet for peace.

Yet the dry wind always remembers its errand.
The cycle pivots on its ocean axle;
the earth dries until it cracks like baked clay,
and the invisible fires awaken from their sleep.

Here, on the edge of the granite island,
we close our windows against the wind of our neighbors’ cleared fields,
knowing the sky keeps no borders,
and that every breath we draw is the ash of ancient forests
seeking somewhere soft to fall.

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