‘The Tourist’ is a poem I wrote about Sri Lanka where I lived for close to three years in the 1980s. It won Friendly Street Poets Poem of the Month award in November 2019 and is published on their web site. Friendly Street is South Australia’s longest-standing and biggest poetry collective so I am deeply honoured.
In its layout and especially the first stanza, ‘The Tourist’ references the most beautiful parade of elephants in Sri Lanka known as Asala Perahara. Asala is the name of the full moon in the lunar calendar that celebrates the Buddha’s birth, death, and enlightenment.
What I call ‘Buddhist surround sound’ in my poem refers to these elephant processions.
Nowadays, similar processions of different size and splendour are found throughout the nation. They emerge in their worshipful brilliance when Buddhist monks begin their annual rains retreat. Once staged only by Kings, the Kandy Perahara is the original, but all are spectacular with their caparisoned elephants, rows and rows of dancers, drummers, flame-throwers and light-bearers circumambulating the streets to crowds in the hundreds of thousands.
The image in my mind is that the whole tiny country of Sri Lanka if seen from above, would look as though there were brightly lit wheels spinning in a clockwise direction all over the island. (Anti-clockwise is considered inauspicious.)
The Asala Perahara certainly celebrates the Dhamma or Buddhist teachings which are identified with the eight-spoked wheel (Dhamma Chakka). The Buddha’s first sermon is said to have set in motion the wheel of Dhamma.
