In-between homelands- Dr Sunil Govinnage
Source:Dailynews
Australians living in Sri Lanka—or Sri Lankans living in Australia—to encounter a body of English poetry that speaks fluently across two homelands, two histories, and two emotional landscapes. In his second collection, Purple Patch, Maithri Panagoda, one of Australia’s most respected lawyers and advocates for justice, offers readers exactly such a gift. These poems bridge continents, memories, and moral reckonings; they sing in a voice shaped by village mud paths and Sydney’s concrete shimmer, by ancestral wisdom and contemporary disquiet. They form a rare moment where Australian-Sri Lankan diasporic writing in English stands proudly as literature of depth, breadth, and delicacy.
At the heart of Purple Patch lie poems of memory—memories that do not fade so much as deepen with age. In the opening poem, “Purple Patch,” the poet writes of age with a kind of luminous surrender: “The weight of years, once heavy as stone / lies light now, settling like autumn’s hush.” This gentle repose recalls Yeats’s late style in poems such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” where longing becomes a soft retreat into the self. Panagoda’s reflective tone also carries Keatsian tenderness, especially in its tactile imagery: “light spills warm on weathered hands.” Like Keats’s instinct to locate eternity in fleeting sensations, Panagoda looks for the fragrance of a life well spent and finds it in memories that “lean in painted bloom.”
Ancestral Memory
Across the collection, one recurrent theme is the persistence of childhood as a living memory. In “Footsteps Through Time,” the poet watches a young boy playing and asks, “Is it him I see? / or the boy I once was?” The poem dissolves the boundary between past and present, suggesting that the self is not a straight line but a returning circle, much like the boomerang the poet later invokes in his Aboriginal-themed poems.
Similarly, “Sanctuary Beneath the Bilin Tree” returns to the poet’s earliest refuge:
“It cradled my dreams, my first poems, stitched from stars and birdcall.”
This image of childhood creativity emerging from nature’s shelter evokes the Romantic tradition, yet what distinguishes Panagoda is the fusion of Sri Lankan village life with universal poetic longing. His trees are not abstract symbols—they are living cultural witnesses.
The poems about the poet’s parents are among the most moving in the collection. “’Amma’ – In Memory of My Mother” echoes with raw tenderness:
“Your laughter was measured, but your smile—oh, your smile—was constant as the moon.”
As the poem unfolds, regret becomes an unhealed wound: “I carry now a silence your voice once filled.” This emotional honesty, neither embellished nor restrained, gives the poem the dignity of lived sorrow.
Similarly, “Father” blends stark imagery of medical decline with the poet’s emotional unravelling: “Connected to a forest of tubes… monitors flicker like distant stars.” When the dying father says, “Safe flight son,” the poem’s restraint gives way to pure ache. In these family elegies, Panagoda joins writers like Yeats, who once wrote that “things fall apart,” (in his 1919 poem, The Second Coming)yet he refuses to despair; instead, he frames memory as an inheritance.
Diasporic Identity
A powerful thread running through Purple Patch is the shifting sense of home. In “Where the Roots Cross Concrete,” the poet asks:
“Where do I belong? / Am I a rootless echo?”
This questioning captures the cultural doubleness felt by many migrants—the simultaneous longing for the old world and immersion in the new. The poet’s ability to describe Colombo’s “carbon shimmer” and Australia’s “bushland fare” with equal intimacy reflects a life lived across borders, neither abandoning nor wholly claiming either land. It is diasporic poetry at its most articulate and dignified.
Panagoda’s decades of work with Indigenous communities resonate deeply in poems such as “Brown Among Black,””She Is Not Her,” and “A Death in Wilcannia.” These poems avoid sentimentality and instead offer sober testimony. In “Brown Among Black,” the poet reflects on the slow earning of trust:
“The red earth did not embrace him at first / but it did not push him away.”
Panagoda’s portrayal of colonisation—”Gods caged in museums… even the wind was claimed”—in the poem “Heart of Darkness (after Conrad)” invokes moral clarity and historical awareness without didacticism.
Human Hardship
Many poems confront poverty, violence, and injustice with unflinching empathy. “Two Camps,””The Untouchable,””The Cost of Love,” and “Hand to Mouth” represent a compassionate gaze that is neither voyeuristic nor detached. Consider the devastating simplicity of the war poem “Ashes of Innocence,” where a child in Ukraine says, “Ya shukayusvoyumamm”—’ I am looking for my mother.’ The emotional force lies in its restraint, not in melodrama.
Similarly, “The Untouchable” ends with triumphant defiance:
“I am untouchable… because you can no longer reach where I shine.”
Panagoda’s poetic voice is characterised by:
*Economy of language—lines are compact, emotionally charged.
*Cinematic imagery—vivid scenes such as “a battery the size of hope” or “a flame in the air flickering between voices.”
*Rhythmic humility—the poems speak softly, preferring sincerity over ornament.
*Moral courage—whether describing colonial atrocities or the quiet heroism of love, the voice remains steady and unafraid.
The poems occasionally echo Keats’s sensory lushness or Yeats’s reflective cadence. Yet, Panagoda’s voice remains distinctly his own—rooted in Sri Lankan soil, shaped by Australian skies, seasoned by law, justice, and lived humanity.
Purple Patch is a rare opportunity for readers in Sri Lanka and Australia. The diaspora witnesses English-language poetry that draws from two worlds yet belongs entirely to neither—a poetry that walks barefoot across childhood memories and later strides through Western courtrooms; a poetry that mourns parents, honours ancestors, stands with the oppressed, and celebrates the fragile triumphs of love.
Maithri Panagoda offers us not only poems but a life in verse—past and present stitched together. This is diasporic poetry at its richest: human, tender, and unafraid to remember.
