Written by
Rukshani Weerasooriya

Rukshani Weerasooriya is a poet, who masquerades as a trainee lawyer and an occasional humour columnist for the Sunday Times Magazine in Sri Lanka. She is also the culturally confused product of her parents’ love for travel – she was born and raised in Sri Lanka but has lived a year in India, seven years in Pakistan, a year in England, and a few months here and there in several parts of the world, sporadically, all her life. Perhaps this is reflected in her writing. Perhaps not. She says she isn’t quite sure. All she knows is that she has crazy love for God and that He inspires her to live an abundant life, which sometimes includes a quiet moment every now and then, with pen and paper.

Oyster

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With your impossibly perfect
Fingernails, painted red,
Lipstick at 8AM, even when no-one is at home,
And you spend your morning
Proving (to the dust you rouse
With that wretched broom)
That you matter;
That it would settle without a fight
If you were not there
To oust it like an enemy.

You are the defender of a thousand wars
Waged against the life you wish you lived;
Eighty years is not long enough to know,
It seems, that things can change, leave you behind,
Age around you, while you stay young,
Impossibly supple, incorrigible like a small child,
With eyes that tear and hands that sometimes
Need holding.

There you sit on your single bed,
Always made, neat as a matchbox,
With your radio playing loud,
And your curlers in your hair,
A picture – full of sound –
I will always hold.

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• A BIANNUAL LITERARY MAGAZINE BROUGHT TO YOU BY DESI WRITERS' LOUNGE •

Volume 7

Outside: Looking In - January 2011

Verse

Oyster