Anna Crowe
Sari
Sari
for Christopher and Daphne
Four thousand miles from Scotland, we’re at home
among the rainy mountains, the fields of leeks
and cabbages, the hills that promise tea.
The train clattered and drummed like the Kandyan
dancers at your wedding, blowing its horn
like the conch that brings the bride to the Poruwa.
Those cakes of milky rice you fed each other
swelled and sweetened into days you shared
with us. And now you’re hammering at our door
in the Ella Grand Motel to tell us that dawn
is the time to see the most amazing view
in the world. Christopher’s waking us up again!
your father groans—the way you’d prise open
our eyelids, sharing your every moment, or just
a wee boy scared to go for a pee in the dark.
But all your life you’ve been opening our eyes,
and now you’ve tiptoed away from your sleeping wife
to coax us over the dew to the edge, to show us
Ella’s famous Gap: the light is grey
up here in the grassy gods, the wings dark,
but from six thousand feet we can look through
as the play begins, and day unfolds itself
like the sari a man must wrap around his bride.
A sea of rose-gold pearl whose wave-crests
are mountains as far as the horizon; peaks
appearing, sharpening as the bowl fills up
with milk. A hundred miles away, a lake
opens its eye, and though our hanging valley’s
dark, the sky is slowly whitening;
a bird tries out its xylophone of notes,
rippling up the octave towards the moment
when a tree in the wings will suddenly glitter,
and colour flood the hill and wash us home
on a tide of waterfalls and spice and sweat
to Colombo, London, Fife; into the world
and all that patterned life we can’t yet see.