The River’s Children

Liquid-like hills of the Klang River
recline around her cloud-veiled valley.
Low-lying light reveals
masses of restless people,
rising slowly from their blank and blinded night.
They walk or wind about on roughened roads,
a cacophony of multicolored cars and buses
or ceaseless cycles.
Hordes cascade out
to take their toilsome day.

Many pious and impassioned faithful
cry out with anguished, wistful prayers,
seeking to save themselves
from a postponed certainty of Sheol.
Others simply wake, avoiding prayer
to take a faster time to get to where
the checker-board streets will bear them.
The rushing seeming feral-driven seekers of work
stop in roadways clogged
as rivers dammed by heavy rain’s debris.
Are those who don’t pray
damned as well by hardened tasks
grown tough and cold as shards of clay?
Still, highways push the steel-imprisoned minions,
like flash floods rushing down
their rain-filled ways.

The Klang River still wanders softly,
silently through the valley
among her orphaned children:
Rounded ridges, carved roadways,
and peoples living their days.
Syrup-like, its green-gray waters
ease great silted burdens into the sea.
Like all of us,
for sure, each drop will one day pass
into a still and darkened depth.