Never look at the black sun, my grandmother tells my mother. My mother is a child,my grandmother is still alive. Newspapers warn there is no safe way to view a solar eclipse.We have no special glasses in Sri Lanka yet. But people must see what they can see.Some smear soot across their spectacles. Some hold hand-mirrors high. My mother peersinto a basin of water. She tells this story every year I visit, as if for the first time.In the ripples, the sun looked like the moon, she says. Her voice drifts.It will be many years before the water touches me.
the moon is far away yet it sways the tides
Di Jayawickrema
Feature Date
- April 7, 2024
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Copyright © 2024 by Di Jayawickrema.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Di Jayawickrema is a Sri Lankan New Yorker. Her cross-genre writing has appeared in New Delta Review, The Pinch, wildness, Entropy, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and VONA and Tin House alumnus, her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and anthologized in Best Microfiction. She is an editor for features at The Rumpus and for fiction at The Offing. Find her at dijayawickrema.com and on Twitter @onpapercuts.
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