Too Much

Too Much

I don't think anyone has ever written a book about this,

he tells me, tongue in jowl, but I suspend my disbelief

just long enough falling completely before the joke

then smiling widely and on all sides of my face

and the subject. So, yes I am writing a book about love.

I wrote before about a tsunami and an uncivil war. Now

I write not quite about a tsunami although sadness hits

like a wall of water and I have visited black, bottomless

pits and the edges of ponds that seem like rousing rivers

roaring to a nearby precipitous drop. And I have felt

slings like teargas canisters fogging my eyes and head

as I swig a tumbler of whiskey and peer at the midnight

screen imagining the street scene near the White House,

citizens protesting against murder of black brothers

and sisters as I think of my island love whose heart

is no longer open to nostalgias of the past once

it decided that geography, a couple of bodies of water,

an ocean, and the gulf of age, were too much.

Indran Amirthanayagam, c) June 17, 2020

Black, A Poem. Indran

Black

Black Lives Matter. Your life matters. Black Lives

Matter. The Mad Hatter's Life Matters. And his right

to change his name, to wipe the mad prejudice

out of words matters. Black Lives Matter. My life

matters. Black Lives Matter. All lives matter. Black

Lives Matter. The squirrel's life matters. Black Lives

Matter. The elephants eat bamboo, and babies gather

round their mothers, and there are no electric fences

or shot guns and there is earth to roam and there are

paths to forge. Black Lives Matter. The police chief,

senator, assemblyman, garbage collector, teacher

and poet and all other professions and creatures

on all arks of the world join the march along

16^th Street in Washington D.C. beside giant

yellow letters shouting Black Lives Matter.

Indran Amirthanayagam, c) June 10, 2020