Handwriting by Michael Ondaatje

Buried
    To be buried in times of war,
    in harsh weather, in the monsoon
    of knives and stakes.
    The stone and bronze gods carried
    during a night rest of battle
    between the sleeping camps
    floated in catamarans down the coast
    past Kalutara.
                   To be buried
    for safety.
    To bury, surrounded by flares,
    large stone heads
    during floods in the night.
    Dragged from a temple
    by one’s own priests,
    lifted onto palanquins,
    covered with mud and straw.
    Giving up the sacred
    among themselves,
    carrying the faith of a temple
    during political crisis
    away in their arms.
                   Hiding
    the gestures of the Buddha.
    Above ground, massacre and race.
    A heart silenced.
    The tongue removed.
    The human body merged into burning tire.
    Mud glaring back
    into a stare.
            *
    750 AD the statue of a Samadhi Buddha
    was carefully hidden, escaping war,
    the treasure hunters, fifty-year feuds.
    He was discovered by monks in 1968
    sitting upright
    buried in Anuradhapura earth,
    eyes half closed, hands
    in the gesture of meditation.
    Pulled from the earth with ropes
    into a surrounding world.
    Pulled into heatwave, insect noise,
    bathers splashing in tanks.
    Bronze became bronze
    around him,
    colour became colour.
            *
    In the heart of the forest, the faith.
    Stone columns. Remnants of a dagoba
    in this clearing torn out of jungle.
    No human image remains.
    What is eternal is brick, stone,
    a black lake where water disappears
    below mud and rises again,
    the arc of the dagoba that echoes a mountain.
    Bo Tree. Chapter House. Image House.
    A line of stones
    the periphery of sleeping quarters
    for 12th-century monks,
    their pocket of faith
    buried away from the world.
    Dusk. The grass and stone blue.
    Black lake.
    Seven hundred years ago
    a saffron scar of monks
    moving in the clearing
    and at this hour the sky
    almost saffron.
                   A saffron bird.
    In the bowl of rice, a saffron seed.
    They are here for two hundred years.
    When war reaches them
    they carry the statues deeper
    into jungle and vanish.
    The pocket is sewn shut.
    Where water sinks
    lower than mud, they dig
    and bury the sacred
    then hide beyond
    this black lake
    that reappears and
    disappears. A lake unnamed
    save for its colour.
    The lost monks
    who are overtaken or are silent
    the rest of their lives,
    who fade away thin
    as the skeletons of leaf.
    Fifteen generations later armed men hide
    in the jungles, trapping animals,
    plucking the crimson leaf to boil it
    or burn it or smoke it.
    Sects of war.
                   A hundred beliefs.
    Men carrying recumbent Buddhas
    or men carrying mortars
    burning the enemy, disappearing
    into pits when they hear helicopters.
    Girls with poison necklaces
    to save themselves from torture.
    Just as women wear amulets
    which hold their rolled-up fortunes
    transcribed on ola leaf.
    The statue the weight
    of a cannon barrel,
    bruising the naked shoulder as they run,
    hoisted to a ledge,
    then lowered by rope
    into another dug pit.
    Burying the Buddha in stone.
    Covered with soft earth
    then the corpse of an animal,
    planting a seed there.
                             So roots
    like the fingers of a blind monk
    spread for two hundred years over his face.
    Night fever
    Overlooking a lake
    that has buried a village
    Bent over a table
    shaking from fever
    listening for the drowned
    name of a town
    There’s water in my bones
    a ghost of a chance
    Rock paintings eaten
    by amoebic bacteria
    streets and temples
    that shake within
    cliffs of night water
    Someone with fever
    buried
    in the darkness of a room
            *
    Lightning over that drowned valley
    Thomas Merton who died of electricity
    But if I had to perish twice?

The Brother Thief
    Four men steal the bronze
    Buddha at Veheragala
    and disappear from their families
    The statue carried
    along jungle pathways
    its right arm raised
    to the jerking sky
    in the