The Economics Of Poetry
I will try to balance the books, moral and historical ones, caused by migration, that give me a paycheck and put food and drink on the table, that keep my…
Author: Indran Amirthanayagam
Guy Amirthanayagam
Guy Amirthanayagam (October 23, 1927- May 17, 2003) My father would have enjoyed my new enterprise, writing the sonnet free of the common shackles of obligatory rhyme but standing still in the…
Won’t Go Yet
Thugs, goondas, thousands of them, gathered in villages and towns in the interior and boarded buses to the capital– their purpose, to break up the tents set up outside the Prime Minister’s…
Richard
Animals continue to crack in Sri Lanka, Richard. Lions don’t exist in the natural state, nor tigers roam through the brush. Elephants, yes, are still around, mostly straggly survivors in an orphanage…
Inauguration
I put on a shirt today with red and blue stripes bordering a sea of white, and wrapping my legs a pair of blue jeans, my hair black as crows that…
We Will Not Forget
We will not forget Mullivaikkal, the shot, the strafed, the scissored, and the cluster-bombed. We will not forget holes in roofs, holes in water tanks, holes in heads. We will not…
Trusting Decrees, Sri Lankan Style
Image courtesy AFP/Times of India quoted police spokesman S P Jaliya Senaratne as saying. Senarante I congratulate you. Your diction is pithy, succinct, commendable on all counts. And how sweeping you…
Unsettled Account
I am not surprised by the new leadership’s decision to ban the playing of the anthem in Tamil at Independence Day celebrations. Key members of this government ran the show when the…
Rehabilitation
The outgoing president of my former country just pardoned Jude Jayamaha, murderer of the young Yvonne Jonsson, who had dual Sri Lankan and Swedish nationality, bludgeoned to death in an apartment at…
Free Elephants
Where elephants go to die were departments of Spanish literature in remote Plains and Midwestern colleges. according to Jose Donoso. For me, these pictures of an emaciated, starved, older female, broken, tired,…
Cathedral, Jaffna
I am praying in a pew at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. The building has suffered burning, cyclones, the Eelam war’s bombs. Four hundred years ago Portuguese built the first church here, which…
The Rights of Tea
The tea’s words explode, hot water turns into red and gold. Pekoe picked on Nuwareliya slopes. burnt in kilns, sorted then for the nose of a dapper merchant in a silk suit…
Man Versus Elephant
I hear compensation due for an attack by a wild elephant will increase to rupees 500,000 from the current 200 K in Sri Lanka. Henceforth, if you are unlucky enough to…
Welcome Back, Uncle
After Civil War and Tsunami, floods again, the worst in 25 years, which recalls more or less the war’s length, and the Tsunami won’t return for another hundred. Where will we molder…