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…
Poetry
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…
Galle Face Green 2022
This is the green that has seen one world end and another begin many times over many years: a kickstart show in the thirties, sunrise warplanes rebuffed at Easter, bare heads…
Gotta Go
It’s tumbling down, Man. You gotta know when you got to go, Gota. You don’t have the luxury of waiting for Mother India to take back her child from that…
Reading Poetry at the Attorney General’s Department
A prisoner goes to the jail’s library to borrow a book. The librarian says, “I am sorry, we don’t have this book, but we have its author.” It’s a Turkish joke, much…
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…
This Country is Mine
Image Courtesy of A poem reflecting on the meaning of independence day. This country isn’t yours to offer, Upon the conditions set by you. You can deny me the right to be…
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…
Prisoners Are Human Beings
When we aren’t able to give you more room, than you had inside your mother’s womb, When we ask you to excrete, in a plastic bag, like a dog on the…
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…