after A. Samad Said’s “Gagak Parit” 

I am already dead in both languages 

but it is in English that they kill me. 

They pull off my tongue and tape my beak shut 

before tossing me down the drain. 

They white-out the stiffening of my flesh  

which would have shown I was once alive.  

They erase the details at the stanza’s edge 

so cleanly you wouldn’t notice what was  

missing—a neighbourhood, a country.  

They leave in the retiree and the baby 

only because both have been rendered speechless  

by their own choking.  

They pump the land full of air so that it looks  

plump and heavy and ready to be milked.  

They peel off the labels on themselves,  

sweep their crime under the rug of another language. 

They erect an effigy of paper and ink 

and watch it burn in their place 

from their comfortable parliament seats. 

Then they teach the children this new fairy-tale. 

But they don’t see that the poem  

is not some clean rag  

they can wipe their hands with. 

It is a crime scene—the murder of one crow.  

It is already bloody. 

They forget that in a poem 

anything can happen—even 

the dead can speak.