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Saturday 14 January 2012

My ‘these days’

Blue-sky windows
on rain-threatening days
play hide-and-seek
with thought, eye and heart.
then it rains and rains and rains
erasing cloud,
wiping away window.
did you arrive,
did you leave
were you ever here, 
who are you?

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Friday 13 January 2012

Another dawn song


The most innocent green
dropping down shyly from the staunch kohomba
a hundred vines, 
in their infancy,
a heart-thread 
broken by the more playful tug 
I am overwhelmed
by rasakinda thoughts
this early,
pre-dawn November morning.

[From the collection 'Stray kites on string-less days']

Thursday 12 January 2012

Distances

From nowhere to love,
from being to heartness
from heart to fingertip
is a small distance
and the blend of innocence and truth
is a super highway
without any other traffic but my word.

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Wednesday 11 January 2012

Growing young

We grew old together
the girl in an orange sari
and a schoolboy in white and tie
we flew and fell
but not together,
alone at times
and then with others;
I can’t name the colour
but it was an orange-white mix
a whisper-blend wrap
that kept out the cold of years gone by;
but tonight
flightless and without wing
we stopped
and stayed awhile.
Together. 

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Tuesday 10 January 2012

Forsaken-ism*

‘Forsakenism’

Life is about dress
and undressing
the preference for frill
and forced nudity;
the wayside flower
tryst with boot,
the dog-tag of the living
statistical residencies
that move with wave and boat-ride
from wherever to here to wherever
as masters of fate
and klesha-slaves
in these fashionable times
of trying-on and discarding
where the left behind
and the leavers-behind
label with confidence
and wonder
about the two vultures in the hand
and the dove in the bush.
In private.





*Inspired by a photo essay by Kalpa Rajapaksha

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Monday 9 January 2012

Time-craft

Time,
can it be spliced,
made to multiply
like amoeba,
or collapse
into a nothing
that irrelevances space
and the spatial realities
that make for condemnation
prohibition
imprisonment?
and in that collapse
or multiplicity
would we find each other
beyond entrapment
outside all orbits
and intersections
the envious word
and forbidding silence
and silencing? 


[from the collection 'Stray kites on string-less days]

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Sunday 8 January 2012

FOR LASANTHA AND OTHERS*

Murder is a moment to point fingers
Murder is a moment to crawl into shells.
But moments don’t forbid,
there is no opportune time,
nothing auspicious
about standing up,
speaking out.

Speaking of Lasantha now,
he was not the just-another-guy
not because he was right
(he was wrong a lot of times;
hard to agree with too),
but he wrote his politics regardless
he made his allegiances clear
protected friends
(and some of them were unsavoury creatures too);
it does not matter, though.
He was flawed as the next person
but was more a citizen than many of us,
he spoke his mind,
he screamed.
And I, hardly a friend or fellow-traveller,
salute him,
for I prefer word to silence
in the matter of political engagement.
There is a finger that is itching to point,
let us point it at ourselves
at least in the manner of a question.
Who are we, who am I in these times
of omission and commission?
 
*Written in response to a request made by my friend and fellow columnist Sanjana Hattotuwa who wanted people to express in poetry their sentiments regarding Lasantha’s killing