Launch reading with Pascale Petit, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Dis Poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah
The online launch for Pascale Petit's Beast, Vidyan Ravinthiran's Avidya, and Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics by Benjamin Zephaniah is now on YouTube.
is every country
where I feel, and don’t feel, at home
—a child,
leaving England
for Colombo’s eerily
warm evenings and the alien
language of crickets,
I too was fostered alike by beauty and by fear.
For many a year
through the doorway of dusk
I’d travel there.
‘What’s wrong?’ someone might say
or, ‘I love to see you smile’;
but I was far away.
*
In lockdown with my wife and baby
in green Acton’s
twilit warmth
I’m that lonely boy
listening for crickets
on a pink-tiled rooftop in Dehiwala.
*
What of this country
where I live now but should I leave
—if, say, the virus
touches my parents in England—
my visa may bar our return? Out
of caves in our garden’s stone
wall peeps the immortal
squirrel I saw run
through ancient Polonnaruwa,
three white lines
burned into its back:
the fingermarks of Rama.
[2020]
*
As a child
because my voice was not the right voice
and could not be understood I stood
before the mirror—a murky glassen word
this mouth can’t shape right to this day—and was made
to watch my teeth and lips being imprecise.
So this is why I come across a Southron
and not from Yorkshire, or Sri Lankan; but I’ll complain
no more about this clarified and potent tongue
for when the moustached gent at US Customs
asked me in his hapless twang are you a terrorist, my borrowed posh it sure
abashed that poor colonial; and it was of course
what my child-face perceived or could not in the glass
which made of me a scrutineer of sound,
a listener for and into every glitch
in the aathma, the script, the avid void of English.
*
Burnt palmyra
Felling the other charred and telltale boles
turned black from brown and missing their crown
of leaves used to make baskets and hats,
and as paper by the ancient poets
whose works burned, with the rest
of Jaffna library; those leaves that were
turned into umbrellas as well, which may be why
when the shells came down on these
now cratered, lunar badlands
poor people hid beneath my boughs,
as if bombs might bounce off like rain…
Why is it those who took an axe to all
the scorched lopped trees that would
remember their crimes to the world
left me and me alone standing,
the voiceless lingam you drive past down
the tank-ruined road to the war museum
with its spalled propeller and piffling,
home-made submarines—arranged
to paint the Tigers as a joke
—where a troop of monkeys with a crash of leaves
leap along rusted, bathetic bulkheads
drooping apart in slices like carved meat?
*
Eelam
If my parents were, are, nervy,
camouflaged—against carnivory;
if, at day’s end, their choice is
a belief in perpetual crisis;
if this autotomy and playing dead
(a jettisoned tail, ink squirted)
is the only language they
felt it safe to bequeath;
then, to smile today
with unclenched teeth,
to sleep well, not brood—an ingrate—
over trivially frictive grit
till the pearl of nightmare is fished;
to be at peace—wouldn’t this
betray my parents and my dead,
dismiss as nullity all they did?
Contents List
9 As a
10 Your demon’s basic
12 Next time
14 Trinco
16 Nanthikadal
17 Burnt palmyra
18 Leaving Jaffna
19 May 2021
20 The elephant
22 The elephant
23 Trinco
24 A fisherman
25 The last train
26 The Annupoorunyamal
27 My mother’s English
28 Every year
30 Pillaiyar
32 Lasantha Wickrematunge
38 Autumn
40 Mourning
42 Sri Lanka
44 Rama’s bridge
45 Karna
57 My face
59 Hillside temple
60 Orts
64 Travellers
65 Eelam
66 Research
68 Jaffna, January 15, 2023
70 The Star of India
71 As a child
Related Reviews
Praise for The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019):
‘Ravinthiran’s second collection is a sequence of loose, warm love sonnets to his wife… The outside world leaks through in nods to Brexit and his Sri Lankan family, Larkin and Borges, Super Mario and The X-Files.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'In these days of polemical identity assertion it’s refreshing to read a book whose explorations of identity and relationship are as generous, subtle and sensitively enquiring as these… The heart of the volume is the thoughtfulness with which personal difficulties are related to wider issues, the intimacy with which personal vulnerabilities are revealed, the radiance of the love breaking through clouds of difficulty and distraction, and the generosity of spirit looking with an equal eye at the poet’s own experience and that of other people.' –Edmund Prestwich, PN Review
'Through these beautiful poems of love and the domestic, we encounter the wider world; its racism, its parents, its day-to-day minutiae of living... There is violence lurking here too, a history which keeps threatening to break out from the tight lines and, alongside love, we are asked to consider the value of art, and of politics as well; the ultimate effect and feeling is one of radical sincerity as we move through the collection. Larkin, who gives this collection its title, was a poet who was never afraid to reach towards "Poetry", towards the transcendent truth of the perfectly-selected image. He does not go un-critiqued within this collection, but this is a collection with that same sincere belief in the power of language to capture a feeling precisely.' – Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society Selector, PBS Bulletin
