Friday, June 26, 2020

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


Wednesday, June 10, 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
16th Street in Washington D.C. beside giant
yellow letters shouting Black Lives Matter.



Indran Amirthanayagam, c) June 10, 2020