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 can only
be diffused,
diverted,
distracted, educated,
burned
out of existence
so Ceylon
may take a bow,
step out
of retirement,
save the side
with sixes,
and at the
victory party
speak of boar
and partridge,
gottukola and
other medicinal
greens, traits
of the veddah,
and how
good neighbors
gave food
gave shelter
denied
the goondas?
July 16, 2008
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