The poem I selected

The Portrait of a Sentenced Library

Alfian Sa’at

So these bricks will be torn down

And books will still not have learnt

To spread their feathers and fly

Like pigeons from a shaken tree

So this balustrade will be dismantled

Perhaps reassembled somewhere else –

A conch paperweight by my head is a beach.

Each hour from a postcard Big Ben chimes.

This is the logic of nostalgia –

This is what I mean when I say

That my memory is selfish.

Who can guarantee that roaming

Through a tunnel I will find again

The Children’s Section, where a boy walked

With ‘the Little Prince’ in his hands,

His smile the first line of a novel

Neither of us had read before?

One cymbal left in Chinatown.

Blueprints and forums and rhetoric ensure

That a firecracker makes no sound.