by samodH Porawagamage
Dear Su,
When does the aftermath end? All the time people tell me to forget. Some even bring up the story of a monk who carried a woman on his shoulders to the other side of a river. Apparently, female touch was forbidden to monks. When questioned, he said he had put her down days ago and wondered why others were still carrying her on their shoulders. Today, I climbed up the roof of the school pavilion to catch a better look at the playground. It glistened like a green sea with morning dew. I stood half-foot on the edge and thought if I fell, I could still swim to safety. Then, a purple bird perched on a Mara tree cawed a warning call. I waved at the bird below me and it nodded. Nobody else saw me, but my shoulders ache from all the climbing.
samodH Porawagamage writes about the Sri Lankan Civil War, 2004 tsunami, poverty & underdevelopment, and colonial & imperial atrocities. becoming sam, selected by Jaswinder Bolina and published by Burnside Review Press, is his debut collection of poetry. This postcard poem is from his manuscript All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths, which is a child’s chronicle of the tsunami.