Wish me a rainbow - a book of poetry

A book of poetry titled 'Wish me a Rainbow' was launched in August amidst a gathering of close relatives and friends. The author Devmini Senaya Fernando is 10 years old and attends Holy Family Convent Bambalapitiya.

It is a collection of twenty poems written by her during one year from June 2013 to June 2014 and launched as a bouquet for her 10th birthday.

Devmini Fernando is a Grade Five student. She has the rare talent of observing the world around her and putting it into words. Even as a small child of five or six, she expressed her thoughts in rhyming words and took delight in doing so.

As she grew up she became attached to nature and to animals in particular. Like all children she made her world colourful and bright with her vivid imagination.

Her poem 'Vesak Lanterns' written when she was nine years, shows how much light she sees in this world.

The moonlight, the stars, the Vesak lanterns and the garden light are all put together to give the reader a wonderful picture of the bright world of a child. The short poem 'How I miss her' written in the same year after her grandmother's demise shows the attachment of children. Her feelings and recollections are put with clarity and the poem ends with a simple hope of seeing the grandmother in heaven one day. Children are also little visionaries. They find the presence of something that is not definable in nature.

It is this mystery that colours their life. It is natural for them to end up assuming that even fairies have bread and butter as depicted in her poem 'The fairies in the garden.'

'The storm horse' written this year shows fear and how it is manifested in the mind of a child when a storm begins to form.

Devmini has talent and shows individuality. We also see a freshness of style and imagination. She has presented a poetic world of thoughts words and the imagination in this short collection of poetry.

Flavia Hettiarachchi