two poets from sri lanka : yasmine gooneratne & lakdasa wikkramasinha / TENGGARA 6 - 1973

TENGGARA 6 - 1973
Dept.of English-Univ. of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur/  Malaysia

                                  TWO POETS FROM SRI  LANKA

           Yasmine  Gooneratne

                

                              The Models

                   All afternoon a hammer taps away,
                   wood on wood.    By a window in the verandah 
                   my son sits in the sunshine  
                   making models.

                   His constructions are beautiful
                   and complicated.   A carousel  
                   he made for his sister's  pleasure, 
                   wheels on axles turning at a touch,
                   was too difficult for me to repeat
                   without a diagram.

                   But his models are growing simpler 
                   all the time.   Today's 
                   was the best, an easy 
                   uncomplicated 
                   gun-cariage.


                   What the sky said

                  Trust is transfixed upon a bitter word 
                  The unpolitic tongue le slip, and now in tangles                           Threadbare yet cunning Empire traps
                                                                                     our bird -- 
                  Hearts, circling in vicious wrangles

                  Of pecking argument it keeps and moves
                  Us, who have wheeled in freer air as friends!
                  Stiffly this quarrel shudders (by no lovers' 
                  Kiss to be cured) to its bloody, jagged end.


                 Funeral House

                In the rich baize solemnity 
                of this academic funeral-house
                where smiles turned swords upon each other
                and words drowned the facts in May-tides 
                of typed memoranda,
                reports now root  in reports 
                sub-committees are grafted on committees.

               Their folage hangs its spring green spikes
               along a narrow path littered with paper
               as doctors and scholars discover their
                                                                    disciplines fail
               to heal a savaged University 
               and set themselves to celebrate, decently,
               the death of the young.


                        The Arts Faculty advertises for a crystal-gazer

                Meeting to 'register our wiews 
                on the future of the Unversity'
                we need an astrologer here in our midst
                (preferably Government-registered, a charmist)
                to read the fortunes of the Faculty
                and tell us what will soon be public news.

                Here is the chance to send a memorandum, 
                loyally signed, and catch an august eye.
                "When the King sayeth at noonday,'It is night', 
                The wise man sayeth,"Behold the stars'fair light!' "                     -- An adage  that could never raise  an eye-
                brow  in this ravaged, looted Kingdom.

                We bear upon our backs heroic sacrs 
                won in retreat before the petulance 
                of spoilt and angry young.  The same backs (supple
                from bending backwards) double and re-double
                till, in our terror of a high impatience,
                this last convulsion casts us to the stars.

                        Dr. YASMINE GOONERATNE is  Senior lecturer in English in the University of Ceylon.  A book                            for her poems,Words, Birds and Motifs, appeared in 1972.   She edits New Ceylon Writings.                             -  TENGGARA . 



        Lakdasa  Wikkramasinha


                                       The Workers

               My ancestors did not know
               so much marsh water.
               I think I would like again
               to be drawn to the Four Korales
               instead of being surrounded by
               this stagnant water.

               Grass, gathered endlessly on the surface 
              and a line of coconut trees; husks 
              and its symbol  -- a coconut shell
              rotting in the soil.

             I visit the rain.  I have a different
             appetite to them.    The rain on the grass
             moves with difficulty --
                                    on a cracked and thrown earth

            heaves a chilli stone -- 
            I walk towards it, and bending down
            lay my tongue on it.

            It is different now.    Who will grind anything
            but the teeth os sadness? 
            My ancestors did not know
            the abscence of so many things,
            and this feeling that one is surrounded by water
            that is rotting.

                            LAKDASA   WIKKRAMASINHA

                            <TENGGARA  6-  1973 -- p. 23-25.>

                                                   TENGGARA   6/ 1973