Indran Amirthanayagam

The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards— but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Colombo General Hospital, or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens under a mango tree, or beg in the Borella Market, or ride for historical reasons on patrol boats in the Bay, or stilt-fish off Matara down South, just remember here everywhere there is only man burning and woman burning here everywhere in shallow graves in deep graves floating out of salt water washing down the sands the dead have tongues the dead have ears tongues are speaking to ears What are they saying? What are they saying? Tell us, brown bear bolting out of your cave. Tell us, leopard leaning on your branch. Tell us, flamingos. Bend your necks and pour wine pour wine Hoopoes, kingfishers, cranes, have you got your messages on the bill, are you ready to sing? Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Monsoon.

Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave, not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless strode that bugger which sliced our lives in two: the past where we danced ballroom while the children played carom, and mangos stained our lapels, and today, hobbling, scavenging in ash heaps, how easy the arithmetic, day and night, two by two. Bring on the mind workers. Let a thousand doctors bloom. I lived right here on the x, my name is blue: sea green blue blue green I do not speak in tongues. I am not disordered, a babbler. I did not lose anybody close to me, just 30,000 fellow island bees, not to worry,machan, old fellow, I will subscribe tomorrow, the order of every day, skip and jump rope, whistle, talk to aid workers, even swim.

Kissing your lips I try to forget roses or the fruit of palmyra trees sweet and strong Tongue lolling upon tongue heart beating against heart beating, these are my words signifying our human bodies which poetry does not capture, the absolute desire I have to kiss your lips on this hot and sunny afternoon. I do not know how much longer I can walk about the garden kissing roses, or perambulate the toddy tavern of my dreams where black faces and white toddy mix in black and white memories of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, my Tamil countrymen far away on an island across the sea. Far away and far away the palmyra fruit and your lips. To drink toddy now. To kiss your rosy lips now. To uproot the roses in my garden and offer them upon my tongue now. To fly to Sri Lanka and grab the last fruit on the tree before history throws the Tamils into the sea as is said it will do; before all this and everything else, before the apocalypse, I do so sincerely wish, though my words may not fit, to rest my head in your hair and kiss your lips.

Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office. How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away? How to greet our new years and our birthdays? Shall we always light a candle? Do we remember that time erases the shore, grass grows, pain’s modified? At Hikkaduwa in 1980 I wrote a ditty, a sailor’s song about rain in sunny Ceylon. I don’t know what Calypsonians would compose about this monstrous wave, this blind hatchet man; don’t know the Baila singers’ reply; we are a “happy and go” people yet the fisherman’s wife knows that her grandfather was eaten by the ocean— fisher communities have suffered in time and what’s happened now is just another feast for that bloody, sleeping mother lapping at our island; but what if the ocean were innocent, the tectonic plates innocent, what if God were innocent? * I do not know how to walk upon the beach, how to lift corpse after corpse until I am exhausted, how to stop the tears when half my face has been rubbed out beyond the railroad tracks and this anaesthetic, this calypso come to the last verse. What shall we write in the sand? Where are gravestones incinerated? Whose ashes are these urned and floating through a house throttled by water? Shall we build a memorial some calculated distance from the sea, in a park, in the shape of a giant wave where we can write the names of the dead? Has the wave lost its beauty? Is it now considered obscene? * Yet tomorrow we must go to the ocean and refresh ourselves in the sea breeze down in Hikkaduwa where it is raining in sunny Ceylon. Tomorrow, we must renew our vows at sunrise, at sunset. Let us say the next time the ocean recedes and parrots gawk and flee, and restless dogs insist their humans wake up, we will not peer at the revelation of the ocean bed, nor seek photographs. We will run to higher ground, and gathered there with our children, our cats, dogs, pigs, with what we’ve carried in our hands —albums, letters— we will make a circle, kneel, sit, stand in no particular direction, pray and be silent, open our lungs and shout thanks to our gods thanks to our dogs.

The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year We ride by their music every hour in cabs on trains hearing the pit pat of our grown-wise pulse shut in shut out from the animals of the dry season the losers and boozers, we must not admit our eyes into the courtyard the whimsy of chance and our other excuses— dollars in pocket— to write beautiful songs is all I ask, God to do right with friends and love a woman and live to eighty have people listen to the story of my trip to America The elephants of reckoning are beaten and hungry and walk their solitary horrors out every sunrise slurping coffee bought with change while in some houses freedom-bound lovers embrace late and read Tagore about the people working underneath the falling of empires.