Week 8 Poem of the Week: “Ambiguous Loss” by Siong Chen Meng

Ambiguous Loss

In grief, we look for tangible change.
a sign that our world is indeed perturbed
In grief, we look for concrete steps
to make sense of a world disturbed.

But sometimes that someone is still
around physically. I see you
laughing along in solitary lunches,
browsing in bookstores you mentioned,
in the words I use to comprehend
your mark on me. A mark with no shape
or form other than in my heart.

Others have told me, I’ll get over you.
They speak of a destination, yet give me
no roadmap. They speak of you as past,
even as you haunt me. They speak of better
days because they don’t know any better.
No rituals and no rites to speed what we had off.
Only silence and a quiet spectre in the background.

You are a ghost that I now know I cannot bury.
My first instinct was to eviscerate you.
To burn. To forget. To minimise.
But to do that is to not
honour your indelible mark. It is to say
I’m ok when I’m not. It is to run away.

To honour is to feel. To feel the
dashed hope of affection,
to remember the banter moulded by familiarity,
the serious conversations on love and loss,
the excitement of meeting in person
the promise of a summer never to be.

To honour is to dwell, instead of retreating
to a cave darkened by my own discomfort.
To dwell, fighting the urge for flight,
on the swell of tears choking me up in the night.

To honour what we had is to see myself through.

Image credits: Matilda Head

Earlier today, we sat down over Zoom to chat about the poem and writing in general.

First off, I was curious to hear Siong Chen’s take on the poem, from both what it focuses on subject-wise to where the idea first came from. He highlighted initially that it’s “deeply personal” for him – a characteristic of a lot of the world’s most moving poetry – following “the loss of a friend as a result of unrequited love”.

He then offers some insight into the poem’s title itself. “The title comes from how, in the aftermath of everything falling apart, I was really trying to look for something to make sense of what I was feeling, and I stumbled across this term ‘ambiguous loss’ because, when it comes to friendships falling apart, there isn’t really a social script for that. As opposed to perhaps, say, breaking up, or the death of a loved one or family member, where there are rites and rituals in place to help us process the emotions, whereas that’s not true for the end of a friendship.

“I was really just trying to make sense of what I was feeling, make sense of the deep sense of grief and loss that I felt, that sometimes I couldn’t comprehend or make sense of… In a way, this poem is trying to process my emotions. If you look at the five stages of grief, there’s a movement from denial to something else”, and that’s replicated here in Ambiguous Loss. In the poem’s line, ‘My first instinct was to eviscerate you’, he identifies that sense of denial, before adding that his emotions are seen changing from one stage to the next throughout the poem, as he processed them and moved on. “That’s why it ends with, ‘To honour what we had is to see myself through’.”

With regards to his writing, he tells me that he has been “writing poetry on-and-off for maybe five or six years”, but adds that he doesn’t write prose or anything longer, and instead prefers to stick to poetry because “you can get your ideas down in writing in a single writing session… you don’t have to plan it out or commit to it.” With regards to his writing process itself, he keeps it simple: “I maybe write down a rough draft, then maybe fix the meter, fix the rhyme, that’s it.”

Image credits: Bilyana Tomova

He says he’s written on a wide number of topics and doesn’t have any particular motifs that reoccur often in his poems, with the only recurring topic being that he usually writes “to process what I’ve seen and what I feel”. That said, he notes that “I guess sometimes I write because I want to pay tribute to the poets and writers that I’ve read”, highlighting Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth as a particular example of this.

Another poet he says has inspired him and his writing is Philip Larkin. “Interestingly enough, one of his poetry collections was one of my A-Level texts, and a lot of his cynicism really spoke to me.” He quotes Larkin’s famous This Be The Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”) as an example, commenting that sarcasm and cynicism with regards to love are interesting themes.

Given that he submitted a couple of other great poems alongside Ambiguous Loss to us at The Tab, I was curious to find out if he’d submitted his work to any other zines here or elsewhere before, but – surprisingly to me – he responded that he hadn’t. “I’ve never thought much of my poetry, until my girlfriend told me that I should attempt to get some published – since I’ve already gathered a bunch of poetry over the years.”

Well, I’m delighted that we were able to publish Siong Chen’s poetry for the first time here at The Tab, and I’d definitely recommend that he keeps submitting his work to other outlets here in Cambridge, since there are so many fantastic zines on the rise. And that’s a lesson to all aspiring poets here in Cambridge to never rule out submitting poetry on a whim: there’ll be people out there who want to read it!

Sadly, that’s a wrap on our Poem of the Week feature for Lent Term 2022. Hopefully, our submissions inbox will reopen in the future, so if you too would like to have your poetry published here at The Tab but haven’t gotten around to submitting yet, keep an eye out on our website and Facebook page for more details in the future!

Thank you ever so much to everybody who has submitted their poems so far: you’re all fantastic writers, so be sure to keep writing and keep submitting in the terms to come!

Feature image credits: Matilda Head

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