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.>
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