Opus tesselatum

Opus tesselatum

Written by Seni Senevirante

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Diminutive tesserae, bright shards of marble
and glass paste - copper, cobalt, nickel, gold
and lapis lazuli. My fingers, sticky with Pliny’s
mortar, three parts sand to one part lime,
bind the fragments of my shattered history.

Terracotta cones play geometric games
with pebbled stone and random shells,
in landscapes of enamel, where a flax dresser
combs the bark of Linum trees, lays it out
on grass to bleach its yellow fibres linen white,
breaks and swingles with the swipple of his flail.
Ready for the loom, it makes a canvas for
the seamstress, embroidering familiar gardens
with her alphabet of stitches, who takes the pen
from the fingers of the registrar and holds it,
like a needle, above inky swirls of red and black.
Her eyes close to the paper, she copies
a cross stitch to mark her name.

Tessellated tales of agate, boiled in sugar,
stained as black as onyx, pave the path
of a sea-captain, landlocked by grief,
who trails three motherless daughters,
across the Pennines, to Yorkshire,
where a boot finisher, eighteen years old,
abandons his waxing wheel to join
a Regiment of Foot, and wear out
thirteen pairs of regulation army soles
to defend the British Raj.

Pictographs in amethyst and turquoise
set at angles, catch the light in the courts
of Seethawaka. A Mudliyar strokes
the gold of his brocaded sash and dreams
of grazing water buffalo in the hills of Rakwana,
where a mother, haunted by a vision of an upturned
rickshaw, bows her head before the wisdom
of the astrologer’s charts, to save her unborn son.

Ochre-tinted grout smooths the rough edge of
voices in the family of a lawyers’ daughter.
She discards her Burgher name for love of
a Sinhala; a poet buried under
too many letters of the law; a barrister
paid by the poor with sacks of mangosteens.

The stories coil like ammonite, are etched in epitaphs
sealed in unmarked graves, stamped on soldiers’ passbooks
released from faded photographs, whispered through the centuries.
I gather every bright shard, collect every broken piece,
wash and polish, press them into place.
The mortar is damp and yields to the touch.