Poetry in the Path of a Stranger

I was visiting Kunming when I came across a line of Chinese text printed on a kerb, beside a parked car. Perhaps I noticed it because I was a tourist, walking with an attentiveness that is harder to sustain on a familiar daily route. It ran along the thin strip between pavement and road, where I might easily have stepped past it:

菊花茶在开水里复活：谁说秋天是告别？

“Chrysanthemum tea comes alive again in hot water. Who says autumn is a farewell?”

I do not know who wrote those words, who chose that stretch of kerb, or how long they have been there. I paused because the line belonged so completely to an ordinary moment: dried flowers opening in a cup of tea. Kunming sits within Yunnan’s rich tea culture, and the image felt at home there. It offered an unexpected reflection on renewal in a place designed for the practical business of separating walkers from traffic.

What interests me as a citymaker is the decision behind it. At some point, someone treated the edge of a street as a place where a passer-by might encounter language, not only instructions. Whoever made that decision allowed a small part of the city to speak in a voice other than the functional one.

Singapore has made similar decisions. In 2016, Sing Lit Station began Singapore Poetry on the Sidewalks, or S.P.O.T.S. It used paint designed to reveal excerpts of local poems when the pavement got wet. Poems appeared at the Arts House and along the Esplanade waterfront; a later edition brought excerpts in Singapore’s four official languages to Punggol Waterway Park. Sing Lit Station’s account of the project describes the work behind that moment of discovery: securing poets’ permission, obtaining approval to use the sidewalks, choosing excerpts and making stencils.

The rain supplied the surprise. People and institutions made the surprise possible.