Best Poems Written by Kian Seh Low

Singaporean autumn (DHR)

my wife begins her annual preparation for mid-autumn.
from the kitchen window the phases of the moon
count down for our children to ready cartoon lanterns.
she blends flour with golden syrup, oil, lotus paste into dough,
her recipe calling this a festival, although the seasons
have never learned the habit of changing here at home

there is no real autumn here, but this country found home
for a festival that arrived carrying another’s autumn,
a harvest remembered from places where seasons
announce themselves in falling leaves, while the moon
marks the fifteenth night after work in the fields, and dough
is how abundance is gifted to children beaming like lanterns

light has always been the symbol of hope; likewise, lanterns—
geography cannot take this away, even if far from home.
Southern Chinese migrants carried stories in their dough;
their ships crossed vast seas beneath an ancient autumn
carrying memory in recipe. generations after learn the moon
means celebration, even if they do not recognise the season

bulbs glow where candlelight once did for this borrowed season
while our children practise parading with lanterns
before the actual day when we will be beneath the full moon
along the common spaces linking the blocks we call home.
my wife chooses auspicious idioms to mark mid-autumn,
and imprints the words by pressing the mould into dough 

my wife preheats the oven, about to bake the dough
encasing lotus paste into mooncakes, for this special season.
cartoon rabbits and plastic moons may represent mid-autumn
but patterns of modern popularity are interlopers on the lanterns.
in decades, harvest became festival, then a tradition at home:
I regale the children with tales of Chang’e fleeing to the moon

my wife takes out the dozen of small imitations of the moon
from the oven, and cuts one to verify that the dough
has browned exactly right—an edible history, lovingly home-
made, for lamentation of harvest without fields, in this season-
less country; a lack of swaying leaves that perhaps lanterns
can replace; a longing for cool air that comes with real autumns 

here once a year, one full moon is when mooncakes are in season,
a sweet treasure of fillings in dough, accompanied by bright lanterns
illuminating the many homes pretending we have a link to autumn

Copyright © Kian Seh Low | Year Posted 2026