Germination

By Jonathan Chan

‘Awake, O sleeper,
and arise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.’
–  Ephesians 5: 14 (ESV)

if ever there was the dark delight
of feeling strange, the penalty of
difference in a faceless crowd,
quash it between a lace of
fingers. for no one moves in
earthy fluency, unencumbered
by a swimming thickness. no one
yearns for the taste of ambiguous
loss. for to wake is to listen, treading
in the scuppered soil, watching the
sunbeams scatter between the
casuarina trees. to wake is to
learn each sorrow by name:
tender, unheeded, and slowly
familiar. gradually, each apology
will be as a seed, ripe for dispersal,
yearning for growth,
thirty, sixty, and a
hundredfold.

Jonathan Chan recently graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. He is a naturalized Singaporean citizen. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and human expression. He has been recently been moved by the writing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wole Soyinka, and Ken Liu.‘Varada J.M is a 9th-grader based in Kerala’s Koyilandi, studying at Rani Public School, Vadakara. After hurriedly doing homework, Varada divides her time between practicing classical dance and watching horror films. She loves dogs but nobody at home wants one.