Glimpsing the headlines in the newspapers,
tourists scuttle for cover, cancel their options
on rooms with views of temple and holy mountain.
‘Flash point in Paradise.’ ‘Racial pot boils over.’
And even the gone away boy
who had hoped to find lost roots, lost lovers,
lost talent  even, out among the palms,
makes timely return giving  thanks
that Toronto is quite romantic enough
for his purposes.

Powerless this time to shelter or to share
we strive to be objective, try to trace
the match that lit this sacrificial  fire
the steps by which we reached this ravaged place. 
We talk of ‘Forty Eight ‘ and  ‘Fifty Six’,
of freedom and the treacherous politics
of language; see the first sparks of this hate
fanned into flame in Nineteen Fifty Eight,
yet find no comfort in our neat solution,
no calm abstraction, and no absolution.

The game’s in other hands in any case.
These fires ring factory, and hovel,
and Big Match fever, flaring high and fast,
has both sides in its grip and promises
dizzier scores than any at the oval.
 
In a tall house dim with old books and pictures
calm hands quit the clamouring telephone.
‘It’s a strange life we’re leading here just now,
not a dull moment. No one can complain
of boredom, that’s for sure. Up all night keeping watch,
and then as curfew ends and your brave lands
dash out at dawn to start another day
of fun, and games, and general jollity,
I send Padmini and the girls to a neighbor’s house.

Who, me? - Oh I’m doing fine. I always was
a drinking man you know and nowadays
I’m stepping up my intake quite a bit,
the general idea being that when those torches
come within fifty feet of this house don’t you  see
it won’t be my books that go up first, but me.’

A pause. Then, steady and every bit as clear
as though we are neighbors still as we had been
In Fifty Eight. ‘Thanks, by the way for ringing.
There’s nothing you can do to help us but
it’s good to know some lines haven’t yet been cut.’

Out of the palmyrah fences of Jaffna
bristle a hundred guns.
Shopfronts in the Pettah, landmarks of our childhood
Curl like old photographs in the flames.
Blood on their khaki uniforms, three boys lie dying;
a crowd looks silently the other way.
Near the wheels of his smashed bicycle
at the corner of Duplication Road a child lies dead
and two policemen look the other way
as a stout man, sweating with fear, falls to his knees
beneath a bo-tree in a shower of sticks and stones
flung by his neighbor’s hands.
The joys of childhood, friendships of our youth
ravaged by pieties and politics
screaming across our screens her agony
at last exposed, Sri Lanka burns alive.