Face

Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office. How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away? How to greet our new years and our birthdays? Shall we always light a candle? Do we remember that time erases the shore, grass grows, pain’s modified? At Hikkaduwa in 1980 I wrote a ditty, a sailor’s song about rain in sunny Ceylon. I don’t know what Calypsonians would compose about this monstrous wave, this blind hatchet man; don’t know the Baila singers’ reply; we are a “happy and go” people yet the fisherman’s wife knows that her grandfather was eaten by the ocean— fisher communities have suffered in time and what’s happened now is just another feast for that bloody, sleeping mother lapping at our island; but what if the ocean were innocent, the tectonic plates innocent, what if God were innocent? * I do not know how to walk upon the beach, how to lift corpse after corpse until I am exhausted, how to stop the tears when half my face has been rubbed out beyond the railroad tracks and this anaesthetic, this calypso come to the last verse. What shall we write in the sand? Where are gravestones incinerated? Whose ashes are these urned and floating through a house throttled by water? Shall we build a memorial some calculated distance from the sea, in a park, in the shape of a giant wave where we can write the names of the dead? Has the wave lost its beauty? Is it now considered obscene? * Yet tomorrow we must go to the ocean and refresh ourselves in the sea breeze down in Hikkaduwa where it is raining in sunny Ceylon. Tomorrow, we must renew our vows at sunrise, at sunset. Let us say the next time the ocean recedes and parrots gawk and flee, and restless dogs insist their humans wake up, we will not peer at the revelation of the ocean bed, nor seek photographs. We will run to higher ground, and gathered there with our children, our cats, dogs, pigs, with what we’ve carried in our hands —albums, letters— we will make a circle, kneel, sit, stand in no particular direction, pray and be silent, open our lungs and shout thanks to our gods thanks to our dogs.