#em1x

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

...

— Pablo Neruda.

* One lone meteor streaked across the sky in the blink of an eye when the Quadrantids Meteor shower peaked this morning.

Others were too faint or shrouded in the misty dawn.

Of spirits and souls and what moves you.

The dancers are in a trance and soon others fall too as the top man invokes incantations with hands clasped together.

The dancers ride their woven bamboo horses through as whips crack the air, their bodies and the street, and some feel the crackling electricity.

Maybe its a performance, but the horse neighing from the dancers mouths tell you maybe it is real.

But is it spirit or soul that moves you?

Who is to say what possesses people to dance like a horse, to bite and chew young coconuts for its water, to ensure whipping and have fun until its time for the Maghrib prayer.

What it is is culture and traditions, belief and life, and something so intangible that is worth preserving in multi-cultural Malaysia.

This is the Kuda Kepang, a traditional Javanese dance that spread in parts of the Nusantara and now seen at times in Kuala Lumpur.