BORROWED PLUMES

-Jean Arasanayagam

 

Disguises, part of pretensions to glory

creating new self images

taken from the grandeur of historical

identities other than our own,

 

concealing the starveling poverty

of the cringing flesh frozen in ice-bound

winters of subjugated centuries and alien

traditions decked out in trappings of

those we think heroic

 

Do manners go with textures,

the vari-coloured fibres spinning

whole tapestries of legends, epics, sagas.

 

Find them mouldering in odd places,

in old villas, palaces, castles, museums,

tracing the histories of vanished spochs

as we step out of our prison frames

in search of the lost home we left long ago,

territory no longer defined by the boundaries

of the colonizers.

 

Conquest gave us new mapmakers

staking out piece-meal territories, given

sanctions by the forgeries of history,

setting the counterfeited seals of monarchies

and empire on those documents, scrolls,

fought for and won by assassins and hired

mercenaries leaving the invaded body

Wretched, naked, stripped of all camouflage

clothed now in borrowed plumes

 

 

(Hydrebad 2004)

 

 

 

 

 

 

WARS

-Jean Arasanayagam

 

 

Do not teach me any new love or

Remind me of the old

There are no new lessons to be learned

As time runs out through the hourglass of age.

 

We study maps that were once our lives

We find a land in ruins, every building

Razed to the ground, the palaces and fountains

Were merely fantasies, the ballrooms and the banqueting

Halls paintings in a museum all burnt out

In the land of war.

 

Specters in empty hallways swirling round in rags,

Are our eyes blind?

Do we not see our gallant partners with

Their arms shot off?

The blood drained from their bodies

Flows through the bayonet cut

Into the aqueducts of gutters,

 

And in those ballrooms

Walls of mirrors reflecting our youth, our buoyancy

Are all, all smashed into smithereens

As we flee the ruins

Blood flows from the soles of our cut feet

Caught in the splinters of division.