Tsunami!

How do you explain by fate or accident the loss of 6 children to a father who survived? How do you tell a mother standing on the beach that the sea will never return her babies? A tragedy of this scale is something that no amount of words can do justice to. But everywhere you go on this island people have stories, of survival, of great loss. And from that very night, rather than give in to their sense of helplessness, people wrote it down...

We begin to hear the stories; most are tales of miraculous escapes - for the dead take their tales with them. The man who survived by hanging onto a ceiling fan, still turning even as the water rose to fill the room, the German couple in their bedroom fighting for life as their heads were engulfed, saved when a wall collapsed and they were washed out onto the rubble...

Almost everyone has lost something. Many have lost everything. Everyone carries a painful recollection of the day the sea, once tranquil, beautiful and benign - came ashore and didn't stop, swallowing the world and all within its path.

In time they will think of re-building, for now, the fear of the sea remains strong and potent and few have any desire to sleep within sound of the waves.

So writes Duncan Wilson, Director British Council Ho Chi Minh City, who was in Southern Sri Lanka on Boxing Day. His is just one of many stories and poems I read on the tsunami as the editor of WriteClique.net. Some wrote down what they experienced while others tried to make sense of it all. One anonymous writer simply wrote a eulogy to a friend;

... I pray that you
were sharing a smile with your mother as you both
        lost
        consciousness
that your life didn't flash before your eyes
and only violins played in your final dreams

I pray that you died like a swan.

Writing on the tsunami

1. Flows of waters of river Nilwala by Dawson Preethi
2. Morning Always Comes Too Soon by Duncan Wilson
3. Remberance Service Poem: This Bit Of Time... by Roger Ely
4. We shall rise again by Niranga Arasaratnam
5. Tsunami by Amritha Sridaran
6. Witness 9.0 / 2004 by Rajeev Aloysius
7. BLUE SEA by Padmini Siva
8. LOSING MY MIND by Nihal de Silva
9. WE HAVE TO LIVE by Sivagnanam Jeyasankar
10. 2 FACED by Mifthiha Sadikeen
11. The Coming of Tsunami by Fahima Sahabdeen
12. TSUNAMI by Nihal de Silva
13. Thus We Live by Sandra Fernando
14. For Better or for Worse by Nihal de Silva
15. For Orlantha by Marissa Johnpillai