by Indran Amirthanayagam
Lionel Messi kisses the trophy.
We are exhausted and delirious throughout
the continent, rising and falling as our team
controlled the play and was facing an apparently
easy and merited victory with less than fifteen
minutes left and then we lost a penalty, and
two minutes later a shot from Mbappe
so powerful no goalkeeper could have
stopped it; and our players are tired
yet they must limp into injury time
not letting any more goals, so the mini-
match over thirty minutes can decide,
and again we go ahead and then a loose
Argentine hand touches the ball in the area,
an accident, but that of course is irrelevant
to destiny, and we are back in the penalty box
and Mbappe does not miss. Tied now
at three, we try and try but our last shots
do not hit the net, and we are left to finish
the match in the penalty box. Then
our goalkeeper, Martinez, our final fortress,
stops a French penalty, then another goes
wide, and all the Argentines score
with precision. The game is won,
the World Cup won. We are tired
and barely typing on the wire, the keyboard.
But as eyewitnesses, poets, journalists,
we have to write our impressions out.
Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. 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 and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.