[The following are extracts from the pages of Muhammad Haji Salleh (Editor), Emas Tempawan/Burnished Gold (An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Poetry),
Rustam A. Sani was born in Tanjung Malim, Perak, in 1944. He grew up in a world of political struggle, and eventually became the Deputy President of Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM). He studied at the University of Malaya (KL), University of Reading, University of Kent at Canterbury (UK), Yale University (US) and Uppsala University (Sweden) – specializing in political sociology. Rustam is a well-known political analyst and translator. His only published book of poems is Riak-riak Kecil (1977)
A Poem for
Forgive your dad
for at the moment of your birth
he did not build you a palace of dreams
of cold bricks and stones
eerily fashioned out of chants of praise
He was on a journey
when you arrived
looking for illusive shadows
of the dreams he has destroyed
but yet to bury
The misty darkness of
promised an unending pasture of mystery
at your first cry
the autumn wind did not subside
but incessantly rocked
to the rhythm of the dance of the mirage
tormenting the lone traveller.
1974.
The Monotonous Plain
Tulips in a festival of colours
shyly swaying in the breeze
that turned the sails of the windmill
struggling to hide its own face
Everything seems powerless
to prevail over this boredom
on yet another inch of level ground
to traverse
Here the inhabitants have dammed the sea
in order to become man
for nature has failed to offer mountains
for him wrestle with.
1974.
