By W.S. Rendra

Downing a whole bottle of beer,
I stare at the world,
and what I see is people starving.
I light some incense,
breath in the earth,
and listen to the thunder of the rioters.

The cost of hitting the town for one night,
is equivalent to the cost of developing ten villages!
What the hell kind of civilization have we created?

Why do we build huge cities,
and ignore the culture of the villages?
Why does development lead to hoarding,
rather than distribution?

Huge cities here don’t grow from industry.
They grow from the needs of foreign industrial countries
for markets and their need to buy natural resources.
Large cities here
are a means for Europe, Japan, China, America,
Australia and other industrial countries to accumulate.

Where are the old back roads?
The ones which connected villages with other villages?
They’re now abandoned.
They’re now ditches or potholes.

The roads today
represent the colonizer’s planning of years ago.
They’re just a means of distributing foreign goods from
the ports to regional centers, and natural resources from regional centers to the ports. Roads are created specifically for,
not the farmers,
but the middlemen and the Chinese businessmen.

Now we’re swept away in a stream of civilization that we don’t control.
Where we can’t do anything except shit and eat,
without the power to create anything.
Are we going to just stop here like this?

Do all countries that want to advance have to become industrial countries?
Do we dream of having endless factories,
which ceaselessly produce –
have to forever just produce things –
and finally force other countries
to become markets for our products?

Is the only option apart from industry just tourism?
Does our economic thinking
suck only on the breast milk of communism and capitalism?
Why is our own environment not considered?
Will we just be swept away
in the power of accumulating things
which spread pollution and degradation
of nature both without and nature within people themselves?

We have been taken over by one dream
to become someone else.
We have become foreign
in the land of our own ancestors.
Villagers are skittish, chasing the dream,
and enslaving themselves to Jakarta.
The people of Jakarta are skittish, chasing the dream
and enslaving themselves to Japan, Europe or America.

Pejambon, June 23, 1977

Poem for a Bottle of Beer (Sajak Sebotol Bir) was published in State of Emergency, W.S. Rendra, Wild & Woolley, Glebe, 1978, p. 62.

Featured image: ASIMETRIS (full movie)

By W.S. Rendra

A mountain breeze sweeps down, creeps through the forest
then blows across the surface of a vast river,
coming to rest finally among the tobacco leaves.

Then its heart is filled with compassion
On seeing the sad fate of the peasant workers
Planted in soil that is so rich, so fertile,
But which provides no prosperity for its people.

The peasant workers,
Living in windowless shacks,
Plant seedlings in the fertile soil,
Reap abundant rich harvests
While their own lives are full of misery.

They harvest for rich landlords
Who own beautiful palaces.

Their sweat turns into gold
That is collected by the fat owners of cigar
factories in Europe.
And when they demand income equality,
The economists adjust their ties nervously,
and respond by dispatching condoms.
Suffering overflows
from the trenches lining the faces of my people.

From dawn till dusk,
the bedraggled people of my country trudge, striving,
turning to the left, turning to right,
in an effort that is uncertain.

At sundown they turn into a pile of garbage,
and at night they are sprawled across the floor,
and their souls are transformed into condors.

Thousands of condors,
millions of condors,
flocking toward the high mountains,
and there gain respite from the loneliness.

Because only the loneliness
Is able to suck out the revenge and the pain.
The condors screech.
In anger they scream out,
Sound out in places that are lonely.

The condors scream
On the mountain crags they call out
Sound out in places that are lonely
By the millions the condors scratch at the rocks,
Snap at the stones, peck at the air,
and in the cities there are those who prepare to
shoot them.

Poem for the Condors (Sajak Burung-Burung Kondor) was published in State of Emergency, W.S. Rendra, Wild & Woolley, Glebe, 1978, p. 58.

Featured image: [De Rivier] Waterval met roofvogel