Too Heavy to Bear
POETRY FORMAT, 8 Dec 2025
Sanjeewani Rupasinghe - TRANSCEND Media Service
Inspired by the Landslides in Sri Lanka’s Mountains – 2 Dec 2025
In the pearl of the Indian Ocean,
A thousand blue hills once kissed the sky—
until suddenly they slipped,
they broke, they fell.
They said it was the rain,
they said it was the cyclone,
They said it was a storm.
But all were lies.
The truth was simpler—
they could bear no more.
Hundreds of thousands of lives
were taken.
The mountains watched it all.
Tamil shops set ablaze,
mountains of books turned to ash—
the hills stood silent,
bearing witness,
bearing sorrow,
until at last
they, too, collapsed in silence.
Lives burned beside piles of tires,
bodies drifting down swollen rivers,
eyes torn,
nails ripped,
hell sealed in hidden chambers.
The mountains carried that grief
for years uncounted.
Beneath every army camp
lay buried the quiet truth—
mass graves masked by bulldozers
that erased whole villages.
Still the mountains held the pain
without a cry.
When the sea rose up to the heavens,
devouring thousands in a single breath,
a wonder remained:
the hills did not crumble.
Seyas, Vidyas,
Shobs, Krishanthis—
and tens of thousands more,
women waiting helpless
before violation.
The mountains saw.
The mountains watched.
The mountains endured their agony.
Thousands of lives
enslaved under the tea leaves
For two hundred years
The mountains witnessed
dark cracked line- rooms
Mountains wanted to cry
The rulers devoured a nation
and lived without shame.
The mountains bore witness
as children starved
on a ruined land
as mothers lifted their little ones
and set them gently
into the dark river.
The mountains held that sorrow too.
For decades
they carried and carried
the weight of a paradise
drenched in tears.
They watched everything
unfold.
At last,
the mountains slid—
not for rain,
nor cyclone,
nor storm,
but because the grief they held
became too heavy
for stone to bear.
They said it was the weather.
They said it was the flood.
But there were lies.
The mountains simply
could bear no more.
____________________________________________
Sanjeewani Rupasinghe is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.
Tags: Environment, Karma, Nature, Poetry, Sri Lanka
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 8 Dec 2025.
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