Please,
I miss you

I was the animals hiding beneath your ocean deep
I was the souls living, breathing your salty waves
Because what are sea creatures without the sea?

I learned today that for eyes to be like oceans they don't have to be blue

but first you were everything
and then everything
and then complication
grew like how on a fig tree
a fig
might not grow.

I am a sunflower.
I turn my yellow
and black face,
bruised, to the sun,
hoping its light will
heal me.
With my eyes closed
I can see my stamen,
veins in my eyelids,
bulbous
where they intersect.
The sun feeds me
and I, grateful,
pour myself into
the air. I am
sweet;
I am a bowl
of candy, I live
on your tongue
and I suffocate under
your eyelids.

The Rav
of Northern White Russia declined,
in his youth, to learn the
language of birds, because
the extraneous did not interest him; nevertheless
when he grew old it was found
he understood them anyway, having
listened well, and as it is said, 'prayed
          with the bench and the floor.' He used
what was at hand--as did
Angel Jones of Mold, whose meditations
were sewn into coats and britches.
          Well, I would like to make,
thinking some line still taut between me and them,
poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air.

Inside the voice
of a bird’s cry
is a ride to the distant stars
                  circling the moon
                  through black holes
a soft play of Saturn’s flat rings
a humming heartbeat
a live silence      
a frequency
echoing
          inner space.

©Malintha Perera 2014

I remember
the taste of mud
when I was a child.                                                    
How it laughed beneath my fingers                                
making mellow sounds
making me grin.
I thought they were melted dark chocolate
and  would lick a stain
when no one was around
and then wish that I was the earth
to hold such love
and make people smile
with my touch.