Sinta’s Elegy

By Dorothea Rosa Herliany
Translated by Mona Zahra Attamimi.

i, sinta, have retreated from incinerating

myself. for the sake of holy blood

for the most cowardly man known as rama.

then i washed my body, with black blood,

warming my wild love,

and sprouting it, even in fields growing with depravity.

i chased after rahwana,

and i begged him to copulate with my breath

as it points upward to the empty sky.

i let it fly, so the hands of the cravenly,

the defeated would be incapable of reaching me.

who said my love is white? perhaps, it is dust,

or as dark as my life.

but listen to my bewitching cries,

scorching all that is sanctified and eternal.

i seized my life, not within flames

- the house of sinners,

but within the calm of the wasted and the penniless,

separating my history from the craven

and the liars. rama...

Prambanan, 2002