by Indran Amirthanayagam
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| The captain of Afghanistan’s women's wheelchair basketball team Nilofar Bayat and her husband Ramish disembark from the second Spanish evacuation airplane, carrying Afghan collaborators and their families, that landed at the Torrejon de Ardoz air base, 30 kilometers away from Madrid, on August 20, 2021. (Mariscal / POOL / AFP via Getty Images) via The Nation. |
We are Americans even after 9/11, or Afghanistan, Vietnam for
its generation, which makes me think that we tempt history too
much, are poor students, never learn. So here we go again,
in helicopters and planes with just a handbag, a couple of
documents, and lives of those we can evacuate before the deadline,
and the country shutters up, and we return to insidious inside
operations because we will never learn, war being diplomacy
by other means, revenge always percolating on the stove, politicians
gnashing teeth to spit out America will be great again, under
their blinkered tutelage, investing in heavy tanks, precision bombers
and strategic plans only to realize that none of these can defeat the rebel
with a cause, who knows the land's dips and rises, who can melt into
the crowd, before springing back in the finest and most colorful robes,
to say bye bye American pie, get back by midnight to your promised land.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including Blue Window/ Ventana Azul translated by Jennifer Rathbun (Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books, 2021), The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020), and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). In music, Indran recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.