by Indran Amirthanayagam
for Ilya
The town is not amused. Bombs have been dropping
every ten minutes and thousands of women and children
have already fled, but Ilya's cousin on the Zoom call
keeps insisting on calm. What gives? I wish I could
shift the debate to my own little conflict, lobbing
poems into cyberspace and expecting the fallout
to give some clues about diction and meter, the finishing
couplet. Once again, my poem shifts to a discourse
about me and my proclivities.What about those family
members on the trains? What about the fellow trying
to pacify his cousin via Zoom? What about the soldier
on the border wrapped in an overcoat carrying a rifle?
Is he really able to fight in the modern theater against
the satellite-beamed remote killing device?
Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube.
