Lee Tzu Pheng has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Cultural Medallion (1985) and the SEA Write Award (1987). Other awards include the Gabriela Mistral Award from the Republic of Chile and the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award. Three of her poetry collections won the NBDCS Book Award for English poetry and her poems have been read over the BBC and set to music for choral performance. She published three new books in 2012: _Catching Connections_, _Short Circuits_ and _Sing a Song of Mankind_. Intro: The Singapore River has been at the heart of our changing city scape. It looks quite different from what I remembered it looked like when I was younger and strong feelings are called up by this sense of change. Singapore River by Lee Tzu Pheng The operation was massive; designed to give new life to the old lady. We have cleaned out her arteries, removed detritus and silt, created a by-pass for the old blood. Now you can hardly tell her history. We have become so health-conscious the heart can sometimes be troublesome