Today
by Vidyan Ravinthiran
I was reading my book by the window
waiting for you when I noticed one flower
of those you’d artfully splayed had snapped.
Like a limp wrist the orange gerbera hung, and over
my knuckle it vented a beige gunge. As I snipped
the stem for a smaller vase, the glow
of the radiant petals was too much. Time lapped
me round, the day went unseized.
For this was no opportunity I could have missed;
only the lonely moment which blazed
in my hand, unplucked. Like many,
I had forgotten that time isn’t money
and I don’t need always to be on the move
within the world you’ve shown me how to love.
From The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. Reproduced with kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2019
The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here
Vidyan Ravinthiran
About Vidyan Ravinthiran
Vidyan Ravinthiran (b. 1984 Leeds) was encouraged by his Sri Lankan parents to consider literature ‘a wonderful thing’. He began writing poetry by creating versions of Keats’ odes. This changed when he was given the 2002 Forward Book of Poetry by a friend of his mother. ‘I had these old-fashioned ideas about what a poem should be,’ Ravinthiran explains, ‘and I couldn’t square them with the excitements of free verse.’ In 2008, his pamphlet At Home or Nowhere was published by tall- lighthouse. He cites Yeats, Philip Larkin and Arun Kolatkar as early inspirations; Elizabeth Bishop is the subject of his doctoral thesis at Cambridge. Ravinthiran describes his collection, Grun-tu-molani, as ‘the equivalent of the Ravinthiran family Christmas. We have a roast, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, veg, but also a thousand curries… Everything you could want.’
Forward Prizes History:
- 2014 Forward Prizes for Best First Collection, shortlisted for Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe)
