Poems by Cecil Rajendra
Malaysia

Retribution

There is a rumour
that in the rainy season
ghosts stalk the corridors
of these condominiums.

And is it any wonder. . . .

Decades before bulldozers
muscled their territory
a family of raintrees
camped these foothills.

Limb by limb torn
from their land
stripped and decapitated
their grounds cemented
over, what could
they do, these uprooted
spirits, but inhabit
the man's condominium.

And now, in the rainy season
there is a rumour. . . .
in the nightwind you can hear
the trees howling their dispossession.

Chainsaw Massacre

. But what law, what injunction
will halt this rape, this slaughter
of innocent pines--these virgins
whose pale trunks, like a shoal
of carcasses after a massacre
in a river dumped, roll downstream
to unholy dismemberment in sawmills--
those new-age abbatoirs of our Century.

Hothouse Anachronisms

But vandals
we never were, we never took
any more
than absolute essentials. Never!
Yet, "Slash
and Burn Vandals" they branded us
in treatise
after treatise, book, journal, exegesis. . . .
the well-intentioned
environmentalists in the metropolis.

Never once questioning the hectare
upon hectare
of our forests filched to feed those
voracious presses
that churned out magazines, journals,
books, treatises,
papers and exegeses that condemned us
as savages--
unthinking, unfeeling "Slash & Burn Vandals."