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 both launched and read from his Splintered Face Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, Jan. 2008). Both the poet and the poems are sublime examples of an imaginative power and quiet resolve able to transcend a more parochial violence.