Fruits Poem By Goh Poh Seng -

"Here, the durian waits like a crowned grenade, Its flesh a custard of thunder. The rambutan, hairy and red, Winks at the sun, hiding a pearl of acid-sweetness. You ask for my home? It is not a street or a block number. It is the stain of mangosteen purple on my thumb."

In these lines, the poet transforms the physical act of eating into a metaphysical anchor. The "stain of mangosteen purple" becomes more permanent than concrete—a hereditary ink of belonging.

Let’s look at the craft. Why does this poem stick in the memory? fruits poem by goh poh seng

Literary scholar Dr. Kirpal Singh has noted that "Goh Poh Seng’s fruit imagery is a form of anti-colonial cartography. While the state drew lines on a map, Goh drew flavors on the tongue. His fruits are quiet rebellions against erasure."

What makes the fruits poem by Goh Poh Seng so enduring is its unapologetic sensuality. Western poetry often treats food allegorically (the apple of Eden, the pomegranate of Hades). Goh refuses such abstraction. His fruits are stubbornly, joyfully physical. "Here, the durian waits like a crowned grenade,

The poem rejects the sterile, plastic-wrapped produce of the supermarket. Instead, it celebrates the juice that drips down your chin, the seeds that rattle in your mouth, the sticky fingers of childhood. In doing so, Goh argues that to taste is to remember.

On the surface, the fruits poem is a celebration. But a melancholic undertow runs through the stanzas. Goh writes with the urgency of a man watching the last fruit tree fall to make way for a flyover. In these lines, the poet transforms the physical

In the 1960s and 70s, Singapore’s countryside was dotted with fruit orchards—in Kampong Lorong Buangkok, along the hills of Thomson, and in the rural stretches of Changi. By the 1980s, most were gone. The poem’s repeated question, "You ask for my home?" is rhetorical. The answer is not an address but a ghost.

Goh’s genius lies in his refusal to weep openly. Instead, he offers the fruit as a surrogate home. When the physical geography disappears, the tastebuds become the last map. To eat a durian is to visit a demolished village. To suck on a rambutan pulp is to hear your grandmother’s voice.

The poem is now a staple in the Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level literature syllabi (often under the theme "The Changing Landscape"). Teachers use it to discuss: