Theevu Island

Hundreds of exhausted boats

Arrived with sinking souls,

And many struggling lives

Waved their last good bye

Here in this lonely island;

This island that's interrupting

The grandeur of the Palk Bay.

The orphaned Palmyra trees,

Silent with fear and muted voices,

Have witnessed the murdered rapes

And the virile dances of the pirates.

The shining golden soil

Carpeted by the breeze

That flows across the bay

Is hiding the bones

And the blood-stained clothes

That refuse to putrefy.

Souls escaping from homeland

In search of a safer home

Were left behind, ignored and cheated,

And spent the days of this fateful island transit

As families that saw their blossoms

Squeezed and crushed by lustful hands,

One after the other.

Empty jewelry caskets,

Half burnt birth certificates

And plundered virginity

With erased evidences,

Lie among the wet roots of the mangroves.

The setting sun covers its face with the burnt sky veil,

As a sign of its abstinence from dialogue,

But is pregnant with secrets of the past decades.

The moonlight dispensed in this silence

Ignores the truth written in every Amaavaasai,

Written by the foams of the salivating shores,

And the bleeding fresh wounds.

Among the Sand Dunes

There are skeletons lying as a family,

Decorated by the creeping Ipomoea

And guarded by the pricking Spinifex.

And here's one infant skull,

Lying over a set of female ribs;

May be, the baby lips,

The only one left alive to survive,

Wanted to slurp the last drop of life

From the dead lactating breasts

Of its fateful Motherhood.

No more boats with families float by,

Except the ones with the fishing nets.

But the mournful voices of a lost generation

Echoes in the homeland and foreign lands,

Purified as whispers.