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Pine Row Issue No. 7 Summer 2023 - Featured Poet
The Afterlife of Cut Hair
On the last day of middle school,
I wait for my turn at the barber, watching
his delicate hands cut a girl’s hair like he is
preparing salad for dinner—graceful brilliance
striking cut, click, cut, click. I wonder what
the hair feels to be cut-clicked from his hands.
We hack and rack, quell and fell, hew
and unselve the trees, Hopkins wailed
for the poplars in Binsey.1 Once I thought
the barbers sold cut hair to make
Bombay Muttai.2 So I kept a close eye
on them like a kingfisher, not pay to eat
my own hair. One day a kingfisher
sat by my pond and I hit him with a tennis ball
on the leg. Off-balance for a second, he then
arrowed past the trees. That week Kingfisher6
flew us to Chennai. When I asked what airplanes
had to do with kingfishers, they gave me a special
kids’ meal for free. It tasted like uprooted hair
poorly fried in a barber’s soothing gel.
Notes:
1- See the poem “Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
2- Bombay Muttai is a Sri Lankan variety of cotton candy.
ST Porawagamage is a Sri Lankan poet who writes about the 2004 Tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty, colonialism, among other things. His first manuscript of poems, Becoming Sam, is a postcolonial bildungsroman in verse. All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths, his second, is a child’s chronicle of the 2004 Tsunami. His poems have appeared in The Sunday Observer, Ceylon Daily News, Annasi & Kadalagotu, Stoneboat, Mantis, etc. and most recently accepted by The Bloodaxe Anthology of Sri Lankan Poetry.
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