1. The Burial of Grief: Anne Ranasinghe’s Poem, Don’t Cry
1. The Burial of Grief: Anne Ranasinghe’s Poem, Don’t Cry
2. Missing Someone?
3. Daak Recommends
1. The Burial of Grief: Anne Ranasinghe’s Poem, Don’t Cry
How do we make peace with the ravages of the past? We can find many different answers and directions in poetry: complete surrender, persistent denial, brave acceptance, or transmutation of grief into something beautiful.
Anne Ranasinghe’s poem, “Don’t Cry” offers yet another path — the burial of grief and its gradual dissipation. Ranasinghe’s life followed a tumultuous path from her birth into a Jewish family in Germany, to her escape from the Nazi rule to England where she met and married a Sri Lankan professor, ultimately moving to Sri Lanka and making it her home. Her poems often dealt with the scars of loss and alienation, with recurring themes of violence in both her place of birth and her adopted homeland. In her poem “Don’t Cry”, Ranasinghe espouses a silent burial of grief, letting the hands of time and nature erase the wounds gradually. However, this erasure is not comforting; it somehow feels disconcerting, numbing our memory and removing all traces of the past.
Don’t cry Because the pot is broken It had long been cracked. But gather the shards Dig a deep hole And bury them. And the rain will smoothen The disturbed earth, The sun will bake, and wind trace New landmarks Till finally you won’t remember Even the place...
2. Missing Someone?
Why not send them a handwritten postcard? Check out our Hidden Gems collection which has our favourite pieces of art and literature, or our collections on love, friendship, women’s writing and nature.
3. Daak Recommends
Explore Anne Ranasinghe’s poetry in this repository of audio recordings.
Read another Daak on letting go and moving on featuring Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s poem, “Jo Beet Gayi So Baat Gayi.”