Forest Path

“We followed a footpath fading like old ink on an ancient map
through a crowded forest of trees straining up, sun-searching;
branches, boughs, pushing leaves lightwards.
Birds, dumbstruck by the morning-dusk of this shade,
flew noteless from nest to fruit to open mouth.
Butterflies rose from the ground like
crystallised dust
settling, clustered, helter-skelter everywhere.
The forest, all wilderness,
drank our walking sounds and turned footsteps
into leaf-mulch thuds,
cracking dry vines back into earth fodder,
when suddenly it stopped.
The forest pulled its denseness behind us and pushed us on
to open land, dry grass, where a river thundered somewhere
everywhere ahead of us.
We stood, shielding ourselves,
sun-shocked-sound-struck.”

Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, There's an Island in the Bone.                         Ramya is a poet from Sri Lanka. She is the author of Rhythm of the Sea, and Trinity. Her book of poetry, There’s an Island in the Bone, was published in 2011 and won the 2011 State Literary Joint Award for poetry.