Prescribed Poetry for Sri Lankan Literature PDF

Prescribed Poetry for Sri Lankan Followed their fathers with the paddy in bins Literature And sat by the hearth for the new rice Served steaming and scented by a mother’s...

Prescribed Poetry for Sri Lankan Followed their fathers with the paddy in bins Literature And sat by the hearth for the new rice Served steaming and scented by a mother’s fond hands Monuments by Kamala Wijeratne While the Koha sang on the erabadu trees. The bus sweeps past the swinging trees And the road unwinds long and cold The inscriptions hug the white walls The chassis creaks with the load And the bus swings in and out of halts. And jolts to a halt by the road. I gaze at the unwinding miles of the road And try to make the broken images whole The bus stops for a moment to load And I see the writing on the halt Vague shapes rise undefined in front of me A wayside monument etched in gold. A farmer in a muddied loin cloth haunts me “IN MEMORY OF MY SON” I get a jolt. And a housewife with billowing sleeves and string of beads The legend goes on, on every bus Stare at me out of the unwinding road Stand a new name every time but And their faces are stern with unshed tears. The story’s old “To the hero who fell in the north Erected by Father, Mother and next of kin” More than a dozen names penetrated my mind. But I remember the one common to all “Bandara” master of the soil Sons of those who teased out paddy from this land They would have ploughed this soil Gathered the harvest at reaping time 1 A Soldier’s Wife Weeps by Kamala The way you learned against the door Wijeratne And watched me as I bustled about Last Saturday when you went back from leave I watched until you disappeared over the bend They gave you hero’s burial And’ long after until my breast gave a great With all military honours heave The band palmed And lit lamp before the Buddha and prayed no end And your body passed from inside a mist The drone of voices like a plane On Wednesday when the crow cried on the Making its uncertain way through the clouds dead branch And the sky I think they spoke of the way of the life and Coloured over with the colour of charcoal death I had no fears, I knew you were safe. I think of the bare, barren years I had your horoscope read and there was no malefic Stretching like a road swaying through a desert And wonder how to preoccupy myself But on Thursday when they bore you home How to make the days go forward I did not know what to believe what to think It was a s if I had slept a long sleep On weekends when I have nothing to do And saw things in a haze between life and death I spread the white wedding sari on the floor And contemplate how I stood on the poruwa Saturday we bathed together at the village well with you And you boy- Shyly tying the piece of cloth around my waist Like threw stones at the sneering frogs And drank deeply of the scent of the giant palm How wrong the horoscope readers were That had ominously broken in a splendorous ………………. fragrant flower Looking back now seem to see things I never saw before The way you Hing behind me and touched my hair 2 Peace Game – Yasmine Gunaratne Except to pit up quite a fight Sometimes, against our guns and such. ‘PEACE’ was a game we liked to play We called the entertainment ‘Peace’ as kids of six, or maybe seven, Or ‘War’ – I can’t remember which. it needs some players to divide into two teams, of Odds and Evens. The Odds were the children down the street And miscellaneous scraps and strays, The Evens were my brothers and Our friends, swell, upright, regular guys. Peace was the prize the games was fought (or played, perhaps I mean) to win. Their object was to keep us out and ours to get, and then stay, in for since our fathers didn’t want rough – housing near the orchid sheds, we fought our battles over their parents’ vegetable beds. We Evens were a well – fed lot and tough, so that the little patched and scrawny Odds would never dare to say the teams were not well matched. That was the beauty of the game, We chose the ground and made the rules, They couldn’t really do a thing About it, stunted little fools, 3 Big Match 1983 – Yasmine Gunaratne In a tall house dim with old books and pictures calm hands quit the clamouring telephone. Glimpsing the headlines in the newspapers, ‘It’s a strange life we’re leading here just now, tourists scuttle for cover, cancel their options not a dull moment. No one can complain on rooms with views of temple and holy of boredom, that’s for sure. Up all night mountain. keeping watch, ‘Flash point in Paradise.’ ‘Racial pot boils and then as curfew ends and your brave lands over.’ dash out at dawn to start another day And even the gone away boy of fun, and games, and general jollity, who had hoped to find lost roots, lost lovers, I send Padmini and the girls to a neighbor’s lost talent even, out among the palms, house. makes timely return giving thanks Who, me? – Oh I’m doing fine. I always was that Toronto is quite romantic enough for his a drinking man you know and nowadays purposes. I’m stepping up my intake quite a bit, Powerless this time to shelter or to share the general idea being that when those torches we strive to be objective, try to trace come within fifty feet of this house don’t you the match that lit this sacrificial fire see the steps by which we reached this ravaged it won’t be my books that go up first, but me.’ place. A pause. Then, steady and every bit as clear We talk of ‘Forty Eight ‘and ‘Fifty Six’, as though we are neighbors still as we had been of freedom and the treacherous politics In Fifty Eight. ‘Thanks, by the way for ringing. of language; see the first sparks of this hate There’s nothing you can do to help us but fanned into flame in Nineteen Fifty Eight, it’s good to know some lines haven’t yet been yet find no comfort in our neat solution, cut.’ no calm abstraction, and no absolution. Out of the palmyrah fences of Jaffna bristle a hundred guns. The game’s in other hands in any case. Shopfronts in the Pettah, landmarks of our These fires ring factory, and hovel, childhood and Big Match fever, flaring high and fast, Curl like old photographs in the flames. has both sides in its grip and promises Blood on their khaki uniforms, three boys lie dizzier scores than any at the oval. dying; 4 a crowd looks silently the other way. The Cobra – Lakdasa Wickramasinghe Near the wheels of his smashed bicycle at the corner of Duplication Road a child lies Your great hood was like a flag dead hung up there and two policemen look the other way in the village. as a stout man, sweating with fear, falls to his Endlessly the people came to Weragoda knees Watched you (your eyes like braziers), beneath a bo-tree in a shower of sticks and Standing somewhat afar. stones They stood before you in obeisance. Death, flung by his neighbor’s hands. The powers of the paramitas, took you to The joys of childhood, friendships of our youth heaven however. ravaged by pieties and politics The sky, vertical, is where you are now screaming across our screens her agony Shadowing the sun, curling round and round in at last exposed, Sri Lanka burns alive. my mind. They whisper death-stories But it was only my woman Dunkiriniya, The very lamp of my heart, That died. 5  Don’t talk to me about Matisse – Lakdasa Vivere in peace (To live in peace) - Wickramasinghe Anne Ranasinghe Comment on a review of an Exhibition of Graphics from the German Democratic Republic Don’t talk to me about Matisse, don’t talk to me About Gauguin, or even “Why this obsession with war the earless painter Van Gogh, and its horrors,” you ask – and the woman reclining on a blood – spread … Dear sir, it is easy for you the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse who have lived all your life in this small island haven, and with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal the nearest you have been to crucified by Gauguin – the syphilis – spreader, the yellowed obesity. violent death Don’t talk to me about Matisse… is on the cinema screen. the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio where the nude woman reclines forever But what you have seen on a sheet of blood. there is one – dimensional, lacks the second dimension of love, may be Talk to me instead of the culture generally – a third of pain, how the murderers were sustained a fourth of touch – blood by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote is sticky and warm, villages the painters came, and our white – washed burnt bodies disintegrate – mud – hut were splattered with gunfire. and have you confronted a shadow seared in a wall that was a man in its original state? The fifth dimension is fear, and though of course you try to shake it off, it remains a festering canker till you die. 6  You concede that artistically the works Lines for Richard – Afreda de Silva are good – (this in a casual aside) but, you insist, one was disturbed, and horrified, The dreams of many seasons were and cannot live with this kind of art woven in your short summer’s warp and weft. unless one happens to be a depressophile. The stage that you adorned (And coyly you ask, “Is there such a word?”) is now bereft. Sir, you are reviewing Still in the quiet of that hall an art, not the emotion one hears the haunting resonance of your voice, that caused it to blossom, judging that brought to life this character technique, design, effect. and that in solo theatre. An artist can only express Children’s laughter pealed with wild delight the sum of his experience, as they pranced with you through Kipling’s jungle land not yours. and youth sat marveling when you peopled an evening And then you demand: “When will the Germans stop saying mea culpa?” Never, I hope. with the world that Dickens wrote about. For under their mea culpa lie buried millions of dead, and would you – for the sake of your comfort – Then again, in different that we forget? vein, there were the plays where you explored some inner dark, and an audience went reliving their own lives in the tragic roles you made so real. Yet, for all that restless energy and camadaderie, there was in you a stillness 7  and a transcience Trembling on the other hand, for my virginity. and like the dragon - fly that basks in sunlight a little while Three months the monsoon thrashed the sea, and you spreading its brilliant wings Remained at home; the sky cracked like a shell for all to wonder at and gaze upon In thunder, and the rain broke through. one moment you were here, and the next gone. At last, when pouring ceased and storm winds fell, When gulls returned new – plumed and wild, Channels 1:3 (1990) When in our wind – torn flamboyante New buds broke, I was with child. Fisherman mourned by his wife - Patrick Fernando My face was wan while telling you, and voice felt low, And you seemed full of guilt and not to know When you were not quite thirty and sun Whether to repent or rejoice over the situation. Had not yet tanned you into old – boat brown, You nodded at the ground and went to sea. When you were not quite thirty and not begun But soon I was to you more than God or temptation, To be embittered like the rest, nor grown And so were you to me. Obsessed with death, then would you come Hot with continence upon the sea, Men come and go, some say they understand, Chaste as a gull flying pointed home, Our children weep, the youngest thinks you’re fast asleep: In haste to be with me! Theirs is fear and wonderment. You had grown so familiar as my hand Now that, being dead, you are beyond detection, That I cannot with simple grief And I need not be discreet, let us confess Assuage dismemberment. It was not love that married us nor affection, But elders’ persuasion, not even loneliness. Outside the wind despoils of leaf Recall how first you were so impatient and afraid, Trees that is used to nurse; My eyes were open in the dark unlike in love, Once more the flamboyante is torn Trembling, lest in fear, you’ll let me go a maid, The sky cracks like a shell again, 8 So someone practical has gone To Isabel – Patrick Fernando To make them bring the hearse Before the rain. I wish that I had died at forty, and you when you were thirty – five, while arms were strong to hold desire, ad love was quick to satisfy. Did we then dream, dear Isabel while blood and love both swiftly flowed that they will end in this still lake whence they can find no outward road? And now the tress around have soared to heights of fear and darkly loom; the fish and kingfisher have gone, for both dislike this pressing gloom Instead, the wise reflective owl lives in these threatening trees and thrives And we have now such wisdom reached As understands but not forgives. Now blood and love are chilled and stopped And desire no more alive, So I wish that I had died at forty, And you when you were thirty – five. NLR 3 (1985) 9 Ruined Gopuram - Jean Arasanayam In the month of July - Jean Arasanayagam Somewhere lost landscape Childhood is far away White sands and palmyrah fronds beneath a tree Freakishly black. playing with pebbles All evening the pyres burn skillfully tossing them from Beside the broken walls, back of hand The ruined gopuram. to palm Caves darkened in the evening light, requiring a certain skill and The turquoise seas bright with morning sun magical ritualistic incantations. Dimmed and went black. Unknown goddess, guardian As one grows older Of the freshwater spring the pebbles grow too Is silent. into great stones and The Brahmin chants his rocks hurled with violence Pooja to the gods, camphor smashed skulls spilled brains And incense stream out splattering the pavements. Of the stone door into the evening light. On the shore, the ruined temple’s In the month of July Silent bell is cracked, a man fled from his pursuers Thickened ashes falling dead, he climbed a tree There are no bells the mob aimed stones at him Left for mourning. until they got him down probably fell off, his grasp loosened slippery with blood, his body already battered and then they trampled him to death. NS 7 8.8 (1987) 10