Autumn

Whoever has no house now will never have one.

Whoever is alone will stay alone
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
And wander on the boulevards, up and down...

Autumn Day Rainer Maria Rilke

Its stain is everywhere.

The sharpening air
of late afternoon
is now the colour of tea.
5 Once-glycerined green leaves
burned by a summer sun
are brittle and ochre.
Night enters day like a thief.
And children fear that the beautiful daylight has gone.
10 Whoever has no house now will never have one.
It is the best and the worst time.
Around a fire, everyone laughing,
brocaded curtains drawn,
nowhere-anywhere-is more safe than here.
15 The whole world is a cup
one could hold in one's hand like a stone
warmed by that same summer sun.
But the dead or the near dead
are now all knucklebone.
20 Whoever is alone will stay alone.
Nothing to do. Nothing to really do.
Toast and tea are nothing.
Kettle boils dry.
Shut the night out or let it in,
25 it is a cat on the wrong side of the door
whichever side it is on. A black thing
with its implacable face.
To avoid it you
will tell yourself you are something,
30 will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.
Even though there is bounty, a full harvest
that sharp sweetness in the tea-stained air
is reserved for those who have made a straw
fine as a hair to suck it through-
35 fine as a golden hair.
Wearing a smile or a frown
God's face is always there.
It is up to you
if you take your wintry restlessness into the town
40 and wander on the boulevards, up and down.
(P.K. Page 1916-2010)
 Portuguese Hamlet, Malacca

Of the conquistadores –
these last few acres of sand, 35 But this is the Hamlet
this settlement of whitewashed in the Year of our Lord
plank huts and their inhabitants, nineteen seventy one,
5 a hundred or so fishermen, not fifteen o nine or fifteen eleven.
and those frayed mats
O Saint Peter,
for drying shrimp.
40 Patron of the seas,
That quiet old man bless us
hunched by the sea wall, as always before in pregnant thunder
10 barnacle-riddled,
O Jesus Mary and Joseph
is Mr. de Sequeira,
pray for us
a well-known figure in these parts,
45 that we will be safe
same name as the one
at sea.
who came before Albuquerque.
15 They spend their evenings,
the old men in loose striped pyjamas,
scanning the expanse of sea and mud,
the intermittent flurry of mudskippers
darting from rock to rock,
20 and creeping on soft belly,
head visored like soldadu
stealthy across smooth mud.
Slow grey clouds over the Straits,
splashes of sheet lightning quick as
25 electricity,
low asthmatic rumble of distant thunder.
What memories, alienation
of substance, place and time -
high tide on the river mouth,
30 flashes and tremor of distant cannon,
and, slowly, in the dim confusion,
the emergent ponderous glory
of a crossed galleon?
Ee Tiang Hong (1933-1990)

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 three beserah fishermen
three small souls in a frail old sampan
in the bowl of the sea.
between the teeth of the waves,
between the sea and the home
5 there was no choice
against the big winds
and the capricious sea.
the wind has no heart -
nor the sky nor the sea,
10 and the heart was for words of prayer;
time between the stretches of a red imagination
was a sun of hope,
for the heart knows its logic
and the pains of the whipping winds.
15 what of the wives, sons and daughters,
the tomorrow, the eye of the day,
the rice and the fish, the school fees?
on land how heavy the soul is loaded;
to persevere was as hard as to perish.
20 to go down into the bottom of sea-dish,
the bare dish:
to leap and swim into time?
the early morning nets, the boats
the friends, the gregariousness,
25 and the sea-saw
on the fulcrum of the shore,
harsh land pushed them
into the uncertain sea
deep eclipsing death.
30 do not make this wind our hangman
and the sea where our souls are soaked.

Muhammad Haji Salleh (1942 - )

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 Heeren Street, Malacca
I
Gharry and palanquin are silent.
The narrow street describes
Decades of ash and earth.
Here in the good old days
5 The Babas paved
A legend on the landscape.
And sang their part -
God Save the King
In trembling voices,
10 Till the Great Wars came,
And the glory went, and the memories
Grave as a museum.
Ah, if only our children
On the prestige of their pedigree
15 Would emulate their fathers,
Blaze another myth,
Mediating in every wilderness
Of this golden peninsula.

II
Newcomer urchin strides the gutter
20 Reeking cockroach, rat and faeces.
On charpoy jaga fast asleep.
Under antique lanterns
The Babas, comfortable on old benches,
Gaze at Fords and Mercedes
25 While swallows shrill
Shriek in the twilight
Stealing over the obscurity of eaves.

Ee Tiang Hong (1933-1990)

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