Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Felling the other charred and telltale boles
turned black from brown and missing their crown
of leaves used to make baskets and hats,
and as paper by the ancient poets
whose works burned, with the rest
of Jaffna library; those leaves that were
turned into umbrellas as well, which may be why
when the shells came down on these
now cratered, lunar badlands
poor people hid beneath my boughs,
as if bombs might bounce off like rain…
Why is it those who took an axe to all
the scorched lopped trees that would
remember their crimes to the world
left me and me alone standing,
the voiceless lingam you drive past down
the tank-ruined road to the war museum
with its spalled propeller and piffling,
home-made submarines—arranged
to paint the Tigers as a joke
—where a troop of monkeys with a crash of leaves
leap along rusted, bathetic bulkheads
drooping apart in slices like carved meat?