A Mystery

Poem? History? Fable?  

Academics are divided.  

Written hundreds of years ago, by an anonymous author, it outlines a fearful jungle wilderness tamed by kings, and then destroyed, an earthly paradise that imploded through civil unrest and invasion, leading to the complete breakdown of an ancient civilization, that was subsumed again by the jungle – to a point where its present inhabitants had only the sketchiest of recollections of its past.  

The poem most likely describes a series of historical events, over a possibly very wide period (most likely ancient or early medieval), that occurred in what is today the island of Sri Lanka.  

But the work is quite evidently more than just a historical recollection.   

It is filled at every turn with the author’s own peculiar and inescapable perspective.  Amidst the ruins of a greater past, the current inhabitants live out plain lives, with little hope of redemption.