Those Cast Away in the Sixties

I CARRIED THE RING OF MY PROMISE

By Denny JA

(After fifty-eight years separated by the tempests of politics, Anwar returns — to fulfill a promise once buried beneath time.)

-000-

The Jakarta sky glows the color of old copper—
fractured, gray,
like a painting peeling in silence.

Before the earth he once called home,
Anwar stands, staring at a frozen gravestone.
The name Farah
is faint,
half-erased by dust and decades.

Fifty-eight years ago,
he had left her—
sent abroad by history’s hand,
carrying only a whisper:

“For you, I will return.”

In those years of the republic’s first dream,
Bung Karno sent his children across the sea—
to study,
to gather light from foreign lands,
and one day, bring it home.

At the edge of the city,
Farah had waved goodbye.
Her eyes were twin embers of devotion and dread—
a love pressed between
the fingers of destiny.

And in Moscow,
Anwar bought a small silver ring—
a circle of promise,
a glint of home he tucked into his pocket,
close to his heart.

Then the storm came.
The sky cracked open with fire.
1965.
Bung Karno fell.
Dreams scattered like torn flags
across a blood-soaked street.

His passport seized,
his name unspoken,
Anwar drifted—
a leaf severed from its tree,
a citizen of nowhere.

Yet the ring remained—
a patient witness,
a promise sleeping in his coat,
still waiting for the road home.

⸻

But Farah did not wait.
Her path grew into silence,
into the kind of life that chooses you.

Her father, frightened by rumor,
forced her hand into another man’s.
Love became a shadow
in a locked room.

To him,
Anwar was a ghost branded traitor—
a forbidden memory
the nation itself had erased.

Meanwhile, Anwar wandered foreign streets:
Beijing, Moscow,
each city a mirror that refused to reflect him.

He moved among crowds
but heard no language
that could recognize his name.

Even his dreams spoke with an accent.

⸻

Then came reform.
After half a lifetime,
the gates opened.
The homeland called—
softly, like a mother
who never stopped setting a plate at dinner.

The lost ones could finally return.
But Farah—
the one who had promised to wait—
had long become earth.

Her laughter now belonged
to the soil that once kissed her feet.

Anwar came home too late.

Still, the ring waited,
quiet and loyal.

⸻

With trembling hands,
he dug beneath the shade of an acacia tree,
and laid the ring beside her name.

“Farah,” he whispered,
“this ring is yours.
My love, trapped in the amber of time,
now returns to your eternity.”

The night wind sighed.
Leaves fell like broken vows
returning to the dust that birthed them.

Nothing could bring her back.
But love—
once scattered by the wind of history—
had finally found
its resting place.

⸻

Anwar turned away from the grave,
his steps light,
his heart heavy.

He left the cemetery,
but his soul remained there—
beneath the acacia’s quiet arms,
beneath the copper sky
that once called him home.

He knew now:
Even when history tears love apart,
some promises do not die.
They wander through years,
crossing oceans,
until they find their way home—
like rivers that never tire
of chasing the sea.***

Jakarta, 2024

(This poem is fiction, inspired by true stories of Indonesian exiles who returned home after decades abroad.
In 2023, under President Joko Widodo, the government eased re-entry for those who had lost citizenship since the 1965 tragedy.)

Kompas.id, August 27, 2023