Today I talked to a teen monk about our age. I wanted to find if there is escape from suffering in what he does: you know, wearing yellow robes, learning Pali chants, skipping dinner, no contact with girls and all. He didn’t know either, but he said the process needs to be carried on for longer. Right now, I don’t have that kind of patience. It’s worse because I can’t sleep. If I close my eyes, I keep getting swept away again and again, on land but underwater, faster than a plane skidding off the runway. What I see below are pairs and pairs and more pairs of hands waving from underground. When I hold my breath and look closer, they aren’t waving. They have come above to sway to the force of the wave the way trees swing to the wind, like it’s the most natural thing to do! I’m afraid to hold on to a hand, in case it comes off at the shoulder and I wouldn’t know how to get back there to return it. So, I paid the monk my Wilson Tennis ball for his time and left.
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.
