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Who would milk the Tigress
				
                				    wears no armour    gasmask
				pail within squat thighs
					nor bloodless forefinger and thumb

Cows wear forlorn looks 
	distressed mien 	
    trailing tarred roadmap streaks
                                                   dry udder tears
          for lost stripes
                     after mynas taken to the hills
    forever abandon torrid flatlands      
                               to the reverberating mockery of magpies

splintered limbs
			split podiyal torn fiber ribs
               jut through mortar-upturned tarmac
         signposts to a lost bickering Peninsula and island children
Adam’s Bridge of Hanuman hordes
     loping to reclaim Sita
                                           ghost-towns where once-fenced-in
palmleaf thatched huts in mud-caked villages husbanded grain
the unswaying palmyra droops with juice heavy nongku

                      the tiger cub teen thrust up
                          in sepoy bayonet salutes
                          thrusts her unsung virtue down
                      blind plunge in backgarden well

        a warrior race of she-cats buried deep behind kitchen smoke

Those who came to milk the cow and drink peace
      eat with hands besplurged with menstrual-blood

Where has the milkmaid gone
	her pail half filled with her brother’s blood

The wombs of Purananuru mothers long dry
									bleed
	for their sons
untethered tigers longgone from lairs
		their stripes for flags

						Is there a Mughal in Delhi
	fears a Sivaji in Jaffna
		or the ageing monarch in Colombo
			           his Nizam-ul-mulk in Trincomalee
who would have gladly traded his throne
	to an armourless English captain
			armed to The Buddha’s Tooth
Would a Muhammad Shah prepare
	for the coming of a Nadir Shah
     from the far fastnesses of The Middle Kingdom

Whose no-man’s-land
		would skirt the Tiger-lined jungle trails
	see stripes wavering at the cluck of each rubber fruit

				Who would then growl to remind us
		of thunder
	 of righteous anger
						of wayward peoples
      trekking for elbow space
						under the hardy palmyra
         with only the nongku to slake
		sterile trampled soil
    miles and miles of heaving padi-fields
			wreathed in fatigues 
        the lone lithe tigress
					licking her paw sweet 

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The historical references hark back to the events preceding the gradual rise under Jehangir’s reign and final collapse of the great Mughal Empire: 1739-54 to 1858 in the Indo-Lanka context. Other references draw on the Sanskrit epic: Ramayana in the Indo-Lanka context. 

-From the privately pub. coll. (re-worked: 2016): longhand notes (a binding of poems), 1999, 115p.
© T. Wignesan – Paris,  2016
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