By Siva Prasanna Krishnan
Thousands of ladies rose before the crack of dawn of the Malayan sun to prepare a simple meal for their family,
Before walking to the muster ground for the roll call
Before being transported to their assigned areas
Before they put the knife to the bark
Before moving from tree to tree
While
The rest of the world slumbered.
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With tapping knives in hand
They made the cut
Their bosses could never muster nor master
Guided by the light affixed to their foreheads
Driven by the need to move their children towards a better life
They tapped and they tapped and they tapped.
We called the flow latex
They called it ‘milk’.
It was that ‘Milk of Malaya’ which nourished the slumbering country to rise to its knees
And
Cup by cup the coffers were filled
On the check-roll list they were a part of numbers and statistics that the internal auditors would check for possible fraud.
In the hearts of their children
They were mothers
Who could barely read or write
Who only had vague distant memories of a motherland
Created from stories the elderly recounted with a sense of resigned hope of ever seeing a distant homeland.
With some God-given-determination, teachers set out to teach their children to read and write in their mother tongue
Lest they forget
Life went on with regular monotony
With the sun that rose and set
To give them the light
Which the struggling generators so frugally dished out for a few measly hours
Labour Day
Came and went
Their memories stay
For many a moment
As children remember
A tough determined mother
Who rose with the sun
When life was not fun
And retired with every dusk
Like some unwanted coconut husk
Estates were sold
Cities and an airport replaced the rubber trees
Tappers were scattered
Their talents that once helped build a nation,
Not needed anymore
They the tappers,
Were thrown out into oblivion
Like the proverbial baby with the bath [water].
Labour Day
Salutes the labour
That built a nation
Be it from a rubber estate
Or from the tin mines
Or hand-cutting new roads with pick-axes
Or carrying bricks on their heads
To build up shophouses and towns
So
Far away from a fading homeland.
Some hearts will forget
Some hearts will forever remember…
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
I am the writer
one of the best articles i’ve ever read in recent days. should be translated to bm and be read to our today’s young generation reminding them how our nation was actually built and grew in the early days. Be it during the colonial era or after the formation of the Federation of Malaysia, rubber remained the nation most important agricultural product for almost a couple of decades later.
What a poem! One of the most beautiful I’ve read. It pulls at your heartstrings. That line cut at an angle, that cup of milk with a flowing white trickle into it and those neat rows and rows of rubber trees are a significant part of my childhood memory. That was the scene I gazed at as my father drove us along the old winding roads from Malacca to Seremban to KL and back each school holiday. Rubber trees ‘O’ rubber trees how can we ever forget you.
My name is siva prasanna krishnan and i wrote this 2 years ago on Labour Day.
Without the tappers Malaya would never have become the largest producer of rubber in the world at one time!