Sri Lankan Schoolroom.

• Author: Sundaralingam, Pireeni
• Position: Poem - Poem

Sri Lankan Schoolroom Traipsing across sports grounds picked clean by equator sun we visit my father's school, long-distance callers at the museum of memory. My father points out the places where, giggling, his friends once sat, names that belong to old men in London and Toronto now, names that could barely fit behind these desks. His teacher remains unchanged. Paper-dry voice crackling he dictates the rites of duty and decorum, the triumph of courtesy and reason over the casual accident of race. It is Jaffna, 1983. It is one day in a long, hot summer. It is one day, seconds away from war. Decades from now, this is all that I'll...