Home truths in the aftermath of war
“The war will end.
The leaders will shake hands.
The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son.
That girl will wait for her beloved husband.
And those children will wait for their hero father.
I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.”
– Mahmoud Darwish
Just beyond the bend of the gravel road
Overhung with floating clouds of dust
As stinging as the Sun’s rays in the midday
By the old palmyra tree, dying with its top
Accidentally charred by a barrage of shellfire
And then struck by lightning
Sits the shanty
Barely sheltered by the fraying thatch
Of palmyra leaves
And encircled by a rickety fence made of the same
Where the lonely widowed mother of the dead tiger rebel
Now going blind with her dark visage
Furrowed by the harrowing sorrow of thirty years
Since he was killed in action at 30
Languishes in a hell of untold misery…
At the T-junction where the gravel road
Meets potholed tarmac road
Overlooking the abandoned paddy-fields
Running wild with tall lush grass,
Clumps of reeds and other weeds
Sits the adobe hut
With the leaky thatch of takaran
Rusty and bruised by the attis
Falling at random from the tall coconut tree
Next to the mossy derelict well without a bucket, a pulley or a rope
In the grassy, flowerless garden
Bent at the top like a hunchback
Where the widowed old man with silver hair
Whose son, their only child, had been brought home
In a sealed coffin enwrapped with a replica of the national flag
Imported from China in container loads for a song
On his twenty sixth birthday thirty years ago
And whose wife, mad with grief, had sought solace in an early grave
Languishes likewise in the same hell of untold misery…
Words – Jayashantha Jayawardhana
Until he returned
Her heart almost suddenly started to palpitate
More often than not than any other day
She prayed to God, for one she loved most
To be able to be back home soon
Her eyes exhausted, focusing at the far horizon
To see whether her newly married husband’s boat
Wold appear to be seen in the Western sky
Returning home to console her trembling heart soon
Gloominess emerged all over the Western sky
The sun drowned in the horizon, almost unseen
Which created an unprecedented phobia in her mind
That the chances seemed very much remote
For her lifelong partner to be back home soon
With the cats and dog rain with loud thunder
The prospects of a terrible storm loomed large
She realised, because of that and that alone
There was little chance for any boat to be back soon
The alarming nature of the sea tide, high and low
Slashed and splashed in a frightening rhythm
and sound
Made doubts hovering in her subconscious mind
about her better half’s coming back home, soon
None of the boats that left to sea,
almost with the dawn
Appeared to have hitherto returned to the shore
There seemed no moon, for it was new moon
To have sent a message to him at least via the moon
Words – S.S.J. Fernando
