Today is Day 642 of the daily poems, in September 2024; some five decades ago our poet Jane Monach was in Bali, where she saw a troupe of women performing the Keçak dance (the monkey dance) which is usually performed by men making the musical monkey noises; only recently have women been included. This led to an imagining …
Here come the Keçak women
running wild
çakçakçakking through supermarkets
through forests of foodstuffs
rivers of drink, streamlets of sauce
mountains of toiletries
their monkey men left behind
in the valleys of Bali
these wives and daughters, sisters, aunts
dance their disgust at excess
leave trails of cracked cartons
swish their long tails
at glass shards, plastic shreds
at the tyranny of business plans
at the gluttony of profits
piss on packaged lettuce and carrots
trample containers of beetroot and sprouts
free almonds and peanuts
from boxes and tins
fling bananas, their favourites
into the air, un-polythened
liberate kilos of rice
to boil, colour and shape
into sculpted cakes
carried high on their heads
There go theKeçak women
çakçakçakking.
Jane Monach
appears in ‘Slices of Air’ collection of Jane’s poems