by Indran Amirthanayagam
Police ran an armored carrier
into the gate of San Marcos
University, then charged
by the hundreds to rouse
students from sleep and
hound them into courtyards
arresting dozens upon
into the gate of San Marcos
University, then charged
by the hundreds to rouse
students from sleep and
hound them into courtyards
arresting dozens upon
dozens. For what? For
allowing peasants to sleep
on the grounds while
in the city, to express
their right to protest, to say
no to the hard and clumsy-
handed, new, unelected
leader, to ask for
the dictator Fujimori
constitution to be
discarded then rewritten,
to ask for jobs and
seeds after the ravages
of the pandemic.
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.