First published in 2024, Doomsday Dirges is his 26th book. (Photo: Cecil Rajendra)
In his prologue for Doomsday Dirges, Cecil Rajendra writes: Only when the hand of action is stayed/Tongue chained by cowardice/Feet stuck fast in the mire of impotence/Only then do these poems/like wild horses/ gallop out of the hot blood.
Over four sections, the book confronts the death of the planet, of decorum and decency in politics, of romance, and his own approaching demise. “Why not? I’m 84. It’s a fact of life,” says the “lawyer by profession but poet by compulsion”.
In short quick verses best read aloud, “the sun scorches our planet and liquefies a glacier as wind and rain drown people in low-lying pockets; angels and swiftlets swirl, suffocate and fall from the sky … as amazing haze binds us and we cannot see”.
Posturing politicians who mount the podium and whose grey matter in their cranium turn brown and migrate south to their rectum are laughable. What is not are those who preach peace and prosperity as factories grind out armaments and poverty.
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Reminiscences about women, whisky and song show the writer’s caustic humour and critical observations on love, betrayal, matrimony and how passion can easily be overtaken by Mammon. In “Geriatric Grumbles”, he talks about crossing the threshold to “old” and facing death, life’s Siamese twin.
Dying does not bother him but getting there pisses him. Perhaps the last stanza of his final poem best shows why he writes what he does: “… but the day my poems dripped honey/flies began settling on my lips”.
Doomsday Dirges (Penros Press) is Cecil’s 26th book. His first, Embryo, was published in 1965 by Regency Press (London & New York) Ltd, when he was still a law student.
A party of poetry, music and cheer will be held on June 14 at Ronnie Q’s to celebrate the 60th anniversary of "Embryo"'s publication, the 100th birthday of ‘Flower of Malaya’ Rose Chan, whose life Cecil Rajendra wrote about in "No Bed of Roses", and the 33rd birthday of the KL watering hole at 32, Jalan Telawi 2, Bangsar.
This article first appeared on June 2, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
