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Saturday, August 30, 2025

ELEGY AS PROTEST

by Attar Topobroto


 

           for Affan Kurniawan 

 

Leaning on top of Monas’ golden flame, 

piss over all of Jakarta. I am so high up 

that the trickle turns into precipitation: 

golden clouds carrying golden rain. 

This is what falls onto a mass of motorcyclists 

clad in green, like a carpet of moss drifting 

across the asphalt river of Sudirman street. 

Within them, sirens yelling in red and blue. 

The white car, now yellow, carries him home. 

Affan: chaste, modest, virtuous, pure. 

Affan: trapped in a crowd of bodies, run over. 

Affan: limp, pale, dead. 

Later, they will scrub his name from the history books. 

Children will watch sunlight play tricks 

on the pages, rearranging the letters into a man. 

Affan, what will your gravestone say? 

Besides God, who is most gracious and merciful. 

Besides how we have brought you here in our thousands. 

Besides how we have loved you as countrymen. 

The loam-balls thrown on your restful face 

sparkle under the yellow rain. 

When my father was in college, 

he pissed from Monas too, 

after his classmates fell like mannequins, 

full of bullet holes, like a pin cushion 

which has been poked too many times. 

Later, the students walked all over parliament 

like a child kicking an anthill. 

The day Suharto spoke the words of resignation: 

people in bars and campuses crowded TVs 

and hugged each other, laughed and cried. 

Generations of men in my family have pissed 

from the sky even before Monas was built. 

Affan: lily, banyan, person. 

Soon, a green blanket—of grass, of people— 

covers your body. Workers, rise from your slumber. 

Affan, when the yellow rain gives way, 

the blessed sunlight then shall stay. 



Attar Topobroto is a student at the University of Sydney. His poetry appears in 34 Orchard. He is currently working on his first book, an illustrated novella, with Gramedia, Indonesia’s leading publisher.