by Kanya D'Almeida and Quincy Saul, January 2015
Yalpanam, land
of music on the lyre
Like ficus vines
that find a bark and cling,
Jaffna, burning
on the nation's pyre,
A desperate,
wise and determined thing.
To color the
soil this crimson-red clay –
Where deep red
earth is deep as deep blue sea –
Just how many
lives did they have to slay
Where crickets
sing beneath the banyan tree?
Where recent
history has disappeared,
Buried,
flattened, scattered, whispered, feared,
The present has
passed, the future is now,
Answered in the
eyes of a branded cow.
When a jute rope
connects your neck to your hoofs
Even the act of
escape is a noose.
Where ruins old
and new with flowers bloom,
Where causes
false and true in shadows loom.
Where every
scene was witness to a death,
Where heat and
breeze and beauty catch your breath,
In a bottomless
well, echoing sobs,
In a single
temple, a hundred gods.
Silences heavy,
expectant and still,
Where gods have
danced for aeons in the skies,
Lush grapevines
bend to a bent farmer's will
Where trees have
stood for centuries and grown wise.
Not curiosity
shining in the eyes
Where
bulletholes and beauty strangely swirl,
More a quick
sizing up of deceit and lies,
Where freedom's
hands around a kathi curl.
Seas and trees
they preserved, but dreams they stole
Where cultures
grow from land in fields of grain,
Holy and
haunted, sacred and profane,
Ravaged yet
untouched, destroyed yet whole.
Echoes of Jaffna
by Quincy Saul, January 2015
1.
A distant drum,
and a rooster, in the night,
The deep
raindrop of a tabla, and a buzzing beetle,
Sing together a
vision of Jaffna.
The wide skies
over elephant pass
Resonate with
thousands of years
Of bondage and
bravery,
Migration and
invasion,
War and
counter-war,
Peace and
counter-peace.
Villages of
survival,
Full of crows
and pockmarked empty buildings
Dance together a
vision of Jaffna
Which the wide
world will never see.
Empty lands –
flat, vacant, crying their erasure to the empty skies,
They too
resonate, they echo, they resound
With stories the
wide world will never hear.
Yet their
emptiness outweighs all the concrete:
Vacuum becomes
plenum
And emptiness
outweighs extinction.
2.
The music in a
passing car,
Passing on a
road that is also just passing through
Sings of
modernity and progress and development,
While packs of
dogs howl to the stars
With the echoes
of forsaken dreams,
With the echoes
of betrayed causes,
With the echoes
of unfulfilled faith.
There is a
silence in the Jaffna night
Which is full of
ghosts.
The distant drum
whispers, or it echoes,
A foreboding
promise:
That the ghosts
are more alive than the concrete,
That unseen
visions
And unheard
stories
Will always,
In merciless
anonymity,
Prevail.
Neduntuvu
by Quincy Saul, January 2015
Temple of the
growing rock!
Kingdom of dead
coral!
As beautiful as
its breeze,
As the mane over
the eyes of its wild ponies.
Where on a small
dirt lane
I met the eyes
of an old man, with a cloth around his waist and a wooden stick in
his hands.
Flabby in my hat
and clothes and trishaw, I felt like a disgrace and a fraud.
On that same
dirt lane, later on,
We saw a living
corpse,
Beaten, broken,
scarred, but standing, looking at us:
This pony seared
a symbol in my mind forever:
The horror and
the reality of war.
Hundreds of
haunted houses.
Coral walls that
are taken down for parties
And rebuilt
again after.
Beaches that
flare the flames of dead coral into the bottomless blue.
Here is a beauty
which humans made bleak,
Yet bleakness
and beauty become each other:
Almost
everything is in ruins, but
The remains are
showered with flowers --
Bright pink
blossoms are scattered like so much sand,
Splashed with
abandon
On beds of
green, draped over
The coral and
concrete skeletons,
Which stand like
garlanded sentinels to the unknown.
A lone baobob
stares out to sea,
Older than
everything else except the rock,
Bearing with
massive magnanimity the scars of human contact,
Home to
thousands of generations of creatures.
And the growing
rock –
What if it were
the most sacred site on all six continents?
Its anonymity
suggests to me that this is the case.
Is it a cocoon,
or a chrysalis?
Does its nature
reveal ours?
The growing rock
and its temple, called Delft,
As flat as its
great plains of thin green grass
As gnarled as
the roots of its ficus forests,
As beautiful as
all the blues of its many-striped sea,
As pitiful as
the branded cow which wanders,
Neck tied to its
foreleg,
As tragic as the
dead cormorant on the side of the road
Outside the
airy, empty hospital,
In front of the
ruins of a Dutch fort, and somewhere
In the mix of
incredible coal and indelible colonialism,
Between flowers
and war,
There is
something to be rediscovered:
In the superior
eyes of an old man,
In the mystery
of a wild pony,
In slow
strangling swarms of ficus,
In the wary
innocence of children born after the war,
In the new words
for tree and for spider
Which we were
taught by one such child,
On the remains
of an ancient temple,
In the shade of
a giant tree,
In the wind of a
saphire ocean,
Among the dance and
play of butterflies,
Whose flight
seems clumsy
Because our eyes
are too slow to see such elegance,
Beneath the solitary
soaring
Of Brahminy
kites,
And in the
bright and constant singing
Of a small bird
flying at great height,
In the
exuberance, the full bodied expression
Of its song and
dance
It is there!
Find it for
yourself in the growing rock,
In the
blossoming ruins.
