Distant Rain

Lovely morning, world!

Did I tell you about my Penang journey last week? NO? Oh, it must be slipped somewhere:)

That's the thing, I can't post you regularly coz of this connection issue. So, if you find me posting lots of "news" in a day or even in hours, definitely it comes from my saved stories.

Anyway, one exciting part of my Penang journey is that I found this Shaun Tan guy from one of the keynote speaker presentation.

The credit goes to Miss Myra Garces Bacsal, she is a Teacher Educator at National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her passion of talent development is awesome, i guess;) And her presentation titled Beyond Talents was so good, and her closing was stunning! She read Shaun Tan poem "Distant Rain" beautifully.

I've been told that Shaun Tan's books called Tales From Outer Suburbia and The Red Tree were remarkable!

I tried to find it at Kinokuniya here, but they don't have it (yet):(

But most reviews said that the drawings were amazing and all the stories told so innocent and creatively. Well, I am now a Shaun Tan fan!!
So this is one of the "poetic" story fromTales From Outer Suburbia is called Distant Rain:

"Have you ever wondered what happens to all the poems people write? The poems they never let anyone else read?

Perhaps they are to private and personal.

Perhaps they are just not good enough.

Perhaps the prospect of such heartfelt expression being seen as clumsy, shallow, silly, pretentious, saccharine, unoriginal, sentimental, overwrought, obscure, stupid, pointless or simply embarrassing is enough to give any aspiring poet good reason to hide their work from public view.

Forever.

Naturally many poems are immediately destroyed, burnt, shredded, and flushed away.

Occasionally they are folded into little squares and wedged under the corner of an unstable piece of furniture (so actually quite useful).

Others are hidden behind a loose brick or drainpipe or sealed into the back of an old alarm clock or put between the pages of an obscure book that will unlikely to ever be opened.

Someone might find them one day, but probably not.

The truth is that unread poetry will almost always be just that, doomed to join a vast, invisible river of waste that flows out of suburbia. Almost always.

One rare occasions, some especially insistent pieces of writing will escape into a back yard or a laneway, be blown along a roadside embankment and finally come o rest in a shopping centre car park as so many things do.

It is here that something quite remarkable takes place.

Two or more pieces of poetry drift towards each other through a strange force of attraction unknown to science and ever so slowly cling together to form a tiny, shapeless ball.

Left undisturbed this ball gradually becomes larger and rounder as other free verses, confessions, secrets, stray musings, wishes and unsent love letters attach themselves one by one.

Such a ball creeps through the streets like a tumbleweed for months, even years.

If it only comes out at night is has a good chance of surviving traffic and children and through as low rolling motion avoids snails (its number one predator).

At a certain size, it instinctively shelters from bad whether, unnoticed but otherwise roams the streets, searching for scraps of forgotten thought and feeling. Given time + luck the poetry ball becomes large, huge, and enormous: A vast accumulation of papery bits that ultimately takes to the air, levitating by sheer force of so much unspoken emotion.

It floats gently above suburban rooftops when everybody is asleep inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night.

Sadly a big ball of paper no matter how large and buoyant is still a fragile thing.

Sooner or later it will be surprised by a sudden gust of wind, beaten by driving rain and reduced in a matter of minutes to a billion soggy shreds.

One morning everyone will wake up to find a pulpy mess covering front lawns, clogging up gutters and plastering car windscreens. Traffic will be delayed, children delighted, adults baffled unable to figure out where it all came from.

Stranger still will be the discovery that every lump of wet paper contains various faded words pressed accidental verse.

Barely visible but undeniably present.

To each reader they will whisper something different.

Something joyful, something sad, truthful, absurd, hilarious, profound and perfect, no one will be able to explain the strange feeling of weightlessness or the private smile that remains long after the street sweepers have come and gone."

Well, I hope you like it as much as I do!!

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