Singapore, September 2020

An overcast Sunday afternoon
   and the Singapore River is a muddy grey

A woman in a forestgreen hijab
  dances with a cheerfully selfconscious air
  adjusts her cellphone and restarts tiktok.

Four women
  gesture freely over their beers
  speaking in loud and slightly slurred Ilokano

Two tables over
  a group of women
  crowd together over their plates
  lean in for a selfie.
  It is with a frisson of recognition
  that their Tagalog becomes audible.

No emotional sensation cuts so quickly
as overhearing your native tongue
in a foreign land.

It is complex –
  effervescent happiness
  inarticulate nostalgia
  the dull ache of homesickness

It is less the familiarity of the words themselves

and more the tone,
  the pacing,
  the lilt of the overheard speech

that paint an landscape of social experience

protracted absence
  distills into this sound
  a lifetime of feeling.

a complex admixture
  the garish crowded interior of a jeepney
  first hints of petrichor rise off a bone-dry palayan
  the roadside parol kaleidoscope of december
  twilight hours of patintero and tumbang preso
  turoturo dinuguan
  ilangilang

more than this
the frisson of recognition is people, all now distant
  raucous half-remembered conversations over sisig and red horse1
  the latenight lingering of young friends relductant to part ways
  the slap of tsinelas on hardened earth beneath a peeling plywood
              backboard and a rebar rim that long ago lost its net
and a laughter that builds up in your gut               
              and shakes your entire body

there are other, darker aspects to this sudden sensibility
  the rancid sunwarmed estero
  the pained face of a dying ricefarmer–
  but I do not wish to probe these too deeply
  and turn my thoughts elsewhere.

The moment passes as quickly as it arose.

It is always the most fleeting of things.

I walk on and the dull sense of homesickness fades
  lingering at the fringes of my mind
  and then
  it is gone.