He labors on shifting from tree to tree <br />With corn-laden feet and scarred hands <br />Concealed by the melanin cover <br />Of his wrinkled and time-pealed skin <br />A man stranded to pedigree <br />To the inter-generational heirloom of his time-tested craft <br />What no bamboo hooks could ever unhook <br />Nor mechanized monsters could ever colonize <br /> <br />A man with dark tan skin and curly locks <br />Born to a humble heritage of coconut pluckers <br />Die-hard islanders practicing a timeless trade <br />Holding one's life on the tips of his palms <br />With the underside of the sarong <br />Rising between the buttock cheeks <br />And sweat trickling down <br />On tanned hemispheres of a drawn face <br />Armed with a razor-sharp knife in hand <br />Plucking coconuts perched on the zenith of a coconut tree <br /> <br />He knows the perils of a slip <br />The magnetism of gravity <br />The distance to the nearest hospice <br />Yet he labors on firmly holding <br />The bough of a coconut tree <br />A man plucking the worth of a few rupees <br />To feed the fledgling innocence <br />Gazing on from a mud-crafted veranda <br />Of a run-down house <br /> <br />Yet the tireless warrior strolls on <br />Perched high in to the heavens <br />With nimble feet and a grip of steel <br />Tireless in toil, soldiering on <br />In these battlefields of fate <br />Armed with an iron will and the resilience of spirit <br /> <br />A humble man with no bank account <br />With no bed to hold his vertebral column <br />With no color on his plate of rice <br />With no tooth brush near a sun-parched well <br />Embattled by the ruthlessness of fate <br />Battling on from sunrise to sunset <br />With treacle-coated dreams and toddy nights <br />Lingering on to the resolute embrace of time <br />A simple man that could do no wrong <br />Even when the gods could do no right<br /><br />Dilantha Gunawardana<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-coconut-plucker-in-sri-lanka/
