Kampung
A spring of a lamb eager to grow, two days old
Her mother refused to milk her I was told
We fed her in baby bottles and called her Kekepo,
in our village called Kekabu.
Large frogs keep you awake
Lovely kittens tempt you to laugh
Especially during the postures of prayer.
Fireflies come like postmen
with epistles from the saints.
Other countless fleas and flyers
Moths, dragon–and butter–flies, and praying mantes.
Fish in the pond the cats thought were for them
And a bully of a cat that fathered kittens
You cannot count with your fingers.
Wild boars as village aggressors
Trails of tigers deep in the forest,
And of eighty wild elephants
You may meet some along the road
with ivory eyes against your headlight
Rumour of a sun bear shot dead
Chickens oft-pecking
And chicks go missing
Now by snakes and now by falcons
That stand on trees pretending to enjoy the view.
Roosters who tell you angels are visiting
And the friendly Ayam Mutiara always in pairs
Running around greeting visitors.
Sprouting banana trees,
Sweet jackfruits whose seeds taste like chestnuts.
Forty goats, some sound like men in pain
And others like dear Kekepo.
Cricket music to dispel silence
When you look up at night you would think
This was perhaps what the Prophet saw
Before the Qur’ān descended as verses
So must the Qur’ān be studied like we study those lamps
Shadows cast by the moon each white night
How many books I’ve read under the moonlight!
Tall trees of countless genera draw the clouds every day
To water the forest – without fail,
clean us and dispel from us رجز الشيطان
Every day without fail
If it is not وابل, then it would be طلّ
Storms draw near like marching armies
with drums from the distance.
Free water from the flowing river
That you have to boil before drinking
And the stream runs down the mountain
Offering itself from the fridge of nature
Or as a hot spring from the warm earth
What be it, dew on green is a sight
That quenches your thirst for beauty
Iqbāl said, “In every flower there is God.”
Even in the weed flowers
By the leaf shall ye know the tree
So shall ye know God.
The Twin Peaks of Perak with a deceiving height
and yet green to the eyes as malachite
speak to you with a voice like descending from heaven.
Colonial rubber trees everywhere
Durian the tyrant king of fruits
Bamboos and coconut trees
That we can use as we please
Houses of timber like resurrected souls
Who become sad and ill if you part their company,
For more than three days.
The only garbage is from the cities
Like the scribbling of little rascals
On your precious paintings.
Dozens of lizards
(dropping from right above you) on the attap roof
Or between the teeth of the grandmother cat
Hunted from the distant trees
each time you run out of whisker-crunchies
They hunt down a squirrel and leave it to the earth
But they lick clean left-over cooking oil in the pan,
Have Durian for dessert and gobble up even the feathers
Of the birds caught in their claws
Like the poor sparrows and other pretty ones
Who come to freely dance in the air
Afterwards they go sunbathing daydreaming to be lions.
Mole hills here and there
And perhaps a snake hole
But no rats, no pigeons, no crows.
Short grass so the cobra may not stand up to greet you
Otherwise, the ticks can cling on to you for a week.
Dokong come in such abundance
Reminding us to eat fruits in seasons.
Monkeys, shy as their colour black,
Carrying with them their tails like ropes
Come each shurūq as a family orchestra
And so very few humans
Just so very few.
[This poem was born out of my email exchanges with the late poet Daniel Abdal Hayy Moore, may Allah accept him and have mercy on him, who read one of my poems and commented that it resembled Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. Perhaps he was only encouraging an aspiring young man. I was indeed encouraged. He wrote to me, “Write down and send me what you see around you.” It became a habit. This was born out of my notes from one such moment when I wrote down what I saw around me.]