AFLAME - Remembering Black July, 1983

What is a poem
to a man hiding
in the cellar
of his neighbor’s house,

breathing the way
his hostess spices
lentils and mutton,
while son and daughter

keep quiet,
not one word
allowed
in the mother tongue,

and wife strokes
her neck,
the golden wings
of her thali,

and across the lane
a mob, ruffians,
tontons macoutes,
lynch squad, a few

holy men, politicians
in white vershtis,
light rage
and sew pestilence

in summer fires
that turn houses
to foundation stones
and stoke residents

out to shelter
at  neighbors,
St. Peter’s College,
the police station

near Bambalapitya Flats,
before three days
voyage on a ship
hungry to Kankesanthurai

where soldiers
have been swinging
cricket bats
and teenage boys

have stopped
playing cricket,
disappeared,
coerced

into resistance:
this war, these
flames burning
every day since,

and even before,
50 years ago,
1958, when mobs
first enforced

what was deemed
the people’s will.
by unleashing
latent and dark

social energies,
microbes that murder,
that insist on power
as well as alms,

that circulate
in the body politic
and …

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I remember an evening
flavoured by my mother’s
cooking, bringing
two smart patriots
together, to speak
about devolution
not yet realized,
accommodate
what makes sense
seeing the island
from afar, the only
way forward,

two dear friends
who met then
for the first time.
Now, one is laid
to rest, and
the other engages
readers still
to think afresh
about slow or fast
bombs, double-speak,
cynical tongues, how
to bring more than

twenty five years
of war to an end
before all our parties
break up and families
gather, with shot-gun
shells and confetti
to scatter, at weddings
held on holy ground
beside gravestones
where fathers and
brothers, mothers
and sisters are buried.

Indran Amirthanayagam, March 16, 2008

The rollercoaster’s
rolling full throttle,
has a new booster rocket
not subject yet

to safety experiment,
riders thrown every few
minutes, smashed
to ground, publicists

about to stop digging
hands into steaming
lampreys served
with fresh lime juice

to wonder perhaps
that this rate
of civilians hurled
to earth must not agree

quite
with amusement
park patterns
in the fabled

West
where children
go for rides
not to die.

February 5, 2008

Seven school boys,
baseball players,
coach,
waiting for a train,
at Fort Station,
exploded;

18 passengers,
pilgrims, Kandy
to Dambulla,
private bus,
accompanied
by parcel bomb;.

grenade thrown
outside bird
cages
Dehiwala Zoo,
7 injured.
zoo closed;

Anuradhapura,
another 12
puffed out,
don’t have
details
yet;

SMS
stopped
on cell phones
during
Independence
Day parade

of heavy
weaponry,
Air force
bombs
communi-
cations

base
according
to Press
Spokesman
at HQ,
no scribes

allowed
to verify,
or human
rights group
to bring
food or

medicine;
letter
from home,
husband,
late to work,
sleeping pill,

maker of
documentaries
forbidden
to screen his
film, uncle
gathering

family
passports,
wedding
snaps. Who
in hell made
this hell,

muttered
under a
thousand
tongues;
shall we
ascribe

blame,
ask for
identity
cards
to be
stamped,

race
unknown,
then burnt,
ashes flung
into the Bay
of Bengal?

February 5, 2008

Editors note: Indran Amirthanayagam, as noted on his blog, writes poems in English, Spanish and French. He believes in the cross- cultural encounter and learned early from his parents to turn the other cheek yet keep writing poems on the face of the tyrant. I first met Indran at the sui generis Galle Literary Festival in January 2008, where he …

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