Abstract

This study examines the poetic method in Boats Beneath the Nainativu Sky and She Who Waits at Nagapoosani’s Gate, presenting both as methodological exemplars of post-war literary expression. Drawing on mythopoetics, trauma theory, sacred space, and lyrical ethnography, the analysis explores how ritual rhythm and symbolic geography reclaim cultural memory. Each poem enacts indirect witnessing and ceremonial continuity, one through maritime invocation and the other through devotional threshold imagery. Tamil ritual language and sacred landscapes become mnemonic vessels of survival and remembrance. Comparative readings of Eliot, Ali, Arasanayagam, and Brathwaite situate the poems within a broader tradition of post-war verse. The study also engages newer poetic strategies such as forensic reading, healing-centered poetics, constraint-based innovation, and digital mapping. These poems show how lyrical form can serve as witness and ritual, offering a resilient framework for cultural reclamation in the aftermath of displacement and historical rupture.