Telok Kurau : a poem

Dr Oliver Seet (1937) who was an Associate Professor of English at the National Institute of Education before his retirement has been writing poems since his undergraduate days at the University of Malaya (1956-1960) and his poems have appeared in many anthologies, newsletters and magazines. "Telok Kurau" (20th December 2012) as it was in the late 1940's when I went to Telok Kurau Primary School will always be filled with nostalgic memories. It was a place with charm and a certain indefinable atmosphere and some of the happiest and most carefree times in my life were spent there - catching and rearing spiders for combat, flying kites with strings coated with glass, top-spinning, marbles, rubber bands and other boyhood games - lost to the present generation obsessed with smart mobile phones and computer games. Telok Kurau by Oliver Seet At cockcrow in Telok Kurau in a half-remembered borough of time, the passage of the morning was marked by the school bell and afternoons were timeless; spent in leafy hedges in quest of spiders bred to be matchbox gladiators; in sharpening kite strings into incisive weapons for battle in the skies: in honing top-spinning skills to knock other tops out of gyre; in mastering trajectories to become the marble king; in teasing rubber bands to leapfrog into victory. There was freedom to grow In that youthful borough of time in Telok Kurau, to know true leisure and the joys of childhood; not bound by fetters to tutors after school, nor buried by an avalanche of homework, nor isolated by the lure of mobiles -each child in his narrow cell phone forever trapped. Those kampongs through which I walked to school, the stall where iceballs laced with milk and syrup, stood outside the school gates, the kachang puteh man who tapped each fold of nuts twice over to accommodate more, are all gone. But a gossamer of star flakes, lying like a patina over the landfall in the Telok Kurau of that half-remembered borough of time, remains forever lodged in the collective memory of that generation, that grew untrammelled by a surfeit of imposed learning.