Nature and Reality in Singapore

Image is everything. We can make even the most disturbing scene seem poetic by just adding a few birds, trees, or a river. Poetry is one of the mediums that use this mask. In Singapore by Mary Oliver, imagery plays a very important role. She writes a poem about a poor woman she saw in an airport in Singapore washing an ashtray in the toilet, seem like the woman was encompassing a beautiful scene in nature. A poem is always a beautiful thing, so she wrote a poem about this woman making her a metaphor to the serene image of nature. Although the poem seems to be a beautiful inspiration, it really is a way of her rationalizing her disturbed perception of the woman to nature in the poem. She also uses a very interruptive style of writing by jumping from what she is physically seeing, to what her mind's eye is creating.

Singapore is a poem about how a cleaning woman in an airport can be compared to nature. She is disturbed by this woman at first, "Disgust argued in my stomach and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket"(7). She doesn't feel happy about what she is seeing. Actually she does what most of us do, she judges the woman first by her appearance, which was not a pleasant one. For example, referring to when she was feeling her pocket for her ticket. The way the word "felt" is separated from the rest of the phrase, could mean that she was going to say something about how she felt for the woman, but could not put into words. Instead, she wrote a beautiful poem about her. In a poem you are supposedly in a happy place and she wants to put that woman there, " a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem"(13). Mary puts herself in a happy place by writing the poem, and in her mind, the cleaning woman in her poem ...

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...e brainwashed into believing what you look like, describes who you are.

Even is she did not say so, the woman did disturb her. What would you do if you saw a bum coming toward you? Would you be one of those people who cross the street to avoid him/her? How about a suspicious looking stranger, would you grab your purse a little tighter or put your wallet in your inside pocket? We all have these thoughts run through our head at on point in time. We may think the world around us is beautiful at first look, but when you take off your "rose colored glasses", it's scary, cold and strange (not full of birds, trees and rivers).

Works Cited

Smith, Gary. "The Light That Can Shine Out of a Life" 14 Jan 2001

www.firstparish.org

Burton-Christie, Douglas. "Nature, Spirit, and Imagination." Spring 96.

Cross Currents, Vol. 46 Issue 1, P.77 (EBSCOhost).