Singapore’s national flower
is reflective of the country;
small and quaint,
an understated beauty,
something that was stumbled upon,
found by chance or accident
with potential indirectly
proportionate to its size.
This was the power of
Vanda ‘Miss Joaquim’,
forming the basis
of our first fairy-tale.
It’s fiction based in fact now,
or is it fact stretched
to fill the space of fiction?
You know something went wrong somewhere
when official records need to be changed,
whether there was a slip in the penmanship
or a storyteller etching in his piece of history,
forming this real life metaphor
to be one of the many symbols for
Singapore.
Strange how with red ink
crossing over government records,
it still remains a metaphor
for Singapore;
How this cross-breed
was built instead of born;
how now trees
are built, not grown;
how beauty
is made, not found;
how coincidence
never really is.
They say nation-building
is based in history, beliefs and myths.
So, even a nation is built, not grown
on the stories we choose to believe.
Vanda Miss Joaquim by Cheyenne Alexandria Phillips is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
