LETTER | This poem is dedicated to Dato Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who was given a royal pardon and walked free from prison on May 16, where he had been serving a five-year jail sentence for sodomy.

FREEDOM

You stepped out the prison door,
The crowd cheered, elated.
Strange how they now adore,
A man for years incarcerated.

You faced the sky and breathed,
The sweet air of your country.
Beloved One, you sighed,
My heart is no more empty.

Yet something had changed,
You sensed it immediately.
The atmosphere was charged,
With a newfound expectancy.

In a loosely-bound coalition,
Called the Alliance of Hope.
Led by an old, wise Magician,
Who has bound us in rope.

It all seems like an illusion,
You wonder if it’s a dream.
A profusion of confusion,
Yet you smile and beam.

Your story is one steeped in irony,
He that was Villain is now Hero.
Treated like a great celebrity,
When in the past he was Zero.

Beware, for nothing is as it seems,
Their inked fingers have not bled,
Though passion in their eye gleams,
Your heart is wary, filled with dread.

How strange it is to say ‘let it be’,
That friend is foe and foe is friend,
The serpent that you cannot see,
Will strike eventually in the end.

The price of freedom is to forgive,
The Saviour who was your Jailer.
The past is past, you cannot relive,
This drama, karma you must outlive.

MEERA BADMANABAN is an ordinary Malaysian citizen who is still hallucinating in a dream-like state after the ruling coalition of six decades was toppled in the tsunami that was the GE 14.