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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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']

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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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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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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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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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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

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