Imagining peace

A pause
Quiet footfall of zephyr
At this base of white
evening lines come in a quiet
pāli hush.

Eyes open, undulating stones warm the ancients
who see
light meditations in
a chiaroscuro of hope.

Peace comes easy here, for now,
after uneasy undercurrents have shifted
white and saffron interplay.

To imagine peace, what memory chains
to escape crimson strokes
and see inside out on silhouette tracings
What we really are.

To imagine a time when a tiny hand in mine,
her smell, a father’s cooking, a mother’s embrace,
the lightest brush of skin
breath of one’s nape
tongue flicks of desire.

Our ordered lives, this order of life,
to imagine as different requires
no accident, no hero. No patriot
commands or paltry gods.
No enfilade must disturb, no cerise cuts
must mar peace anew.

Then.

Imagine, to imagine peace!
Would it be any different, really? Would we be, any different?
wounds erased, sounds faded
Leave now, yet remember this hope, this moment,
this imagined peace and its warm embrace
against looming shadows
at rest.

[Written for Saskia Fernando Gallery exhibit at the Colombo Art Biennale, 10 - 14 September 2009]

My Rishi

The flames lick,
Longing pricks
Tenterhooks of love.

But they burn too deep.

Smile, look, the mind’s fertile touch.
But to grasp, to reach is everything
To the devil within that teases
With a smile, a flick, a glance
A touch, electrifying.

But I yearn too deep.

Something Sri Lankan at core
That laugh delicate
And a passing breath, caught mid-air
By desire to take root.

Should I presume that much?

Imagined moments hiding
What cannot, what must not.

A tender caress of air then
And the faint scent lingers.

But I love too much.

Liverpool to Hull

Strange creatures these feathered feet on green meadows
Trundling along with me in a cadence of worn by time
Tracks leading to a journey of cherry blossoms and shadows cast
By a quick pop in the ear, in between the Sun’s ascendant power.

The same motion in a hundred million seconds
The instant fields in a passing green melting to rolling hills
Undulating we slow but why? The reflection smiles back, as it has
For so many questions before
In this bracken of excited flirtations with a virgin country.

The Kon-Doc-Tor it seems is quite affable, tuning the chords of each passenger
Greetings stranger and welcome, but have you a ticket?
Yes, say I, mildly fearful, for tickets to this land are conditional
On the unfamiliar and the unproven
As we part, a smile departs.

Then the chimney’s pout, and the spires remind of God and his country
With the rhododendron drone in my ears, purple by sunlight brown by coal
As the junction boxes signal the past, future in a rappers stance,
Rails akimbo, we sway this way, then that to the lithe poles
A music, yellow chorus and a corrugated conductor,
Now beckon me to come.