Funerals have become the only event in my country. Tiny rows of white flags stretch from one pole to the next like the sky's teardrop strings. This is how we announce a funeral in the community. When the elements turn them yellow, people now let them be as if to mean they can’t do anything more to find the missing. Every day, mourners who make up their minds to hold a funeral draw new lines of pearl white flags alongside the weatherbeaten ones. I count them on the way to school: one hundred and ninety-six rows for three thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven to three thousand nine hundred and twelve white flags, because it’s very hard to count on the move. The difference between my highest and lowest calculation is eighty-five, and it’s only six kilometers to school. Sri Lanka has sixty-five thousand six hundred and ten square kilometers.
Samodh Porawagamage writes about the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty & underdevelopment, and colonial & imperial atrocities. His poems appear in the anthology Out of Sri Lanka by Bloodaxe Books and other journals. Becoming Sam, his debut collection, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2024. These poems are from his completed manuscript All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths, which is a child's chronicle of the tsunami.
