Hillside temple

Schoolgirls in white blouses and with long, blue-black braids
stream down the road alive,
once, with dappled, leaping deer

—before they were shot by soldiers
like this bloke in his lucent boots
swaggering past the artillery centre

whose mural reads: “when the going gets tough,
the tough get going …” Fancying himself
an action hero walking in slow-motion

away from a coolly disregarded explosion
he leads the eye past the bars that keep
suicidal couples from Lovers’ Leap,

where the sea’s brilliant, soft-hard tremor
flashes a code through the boulder it’s said
Ravana slashed with his sword.