Written piece
Women who carry a nation
Shehara Rathnasinghe
Sri Lanka
About this piece
Sri Lanka has braved many hardships, from a 30-year civil war to the plight of its underpaid women tea pluckers. Yet, amid grief and their silent battles, it is these strong women who courageously hold the country together, acting as the thread lifting the island nation up.
Remember me,
when you take a sip
from your morning cuppa.
Silver Tips? Earl Grey? or even Golden Tips?
from my calloused hands
to your breakfast table.
Echoes the cry of a grieving plucker.
Forgive me my son,
for waking up in the dead of night,
looking for your face
among the broken Palmyrah trees.
For fighting an everyday battle,
between me and myself
hoping you’d come home.
Air in the North tells the story of a mother.
Forgive me my love,
for being a pessimist.
I do not know how to be happy for a country
that won a war against its own people.
For living a life for two,
with nobody to witness.
For telling your son
to make peace with the homeland
that took his father away.
Forgive me for being happy, just this once
for tracing your name
in the War Memorial,
among a sea of names.
No, my love-
they haven’t forgotten you,
yet-
not on the nineteenth of every May.
A widow’s prayer to a silent God
A thread,
of pluckers that lifts a nation up
with an untold story of grief
that lives long in the leaf.
A thread,
of widows of the South
who are left with a stone cold medal
for fighting a war that protected a nation
from the monsters created at home.
A thread,
of weeping mothers of the North
who still wait at their doorsteps
holding only a picture of a face
that is soon to be buried
alongside her.
A thread,
of silent tears
shed in the Hills, in the North and the South
in the name of an island nation.
A thread,
of women making history
with the versions they had to become,
at the cost of patriotism.