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I walked in the woods
today, a spring in my step,
the Great Leader had
stepped back from
his threats
to the sovereign
Republic of X,
and my tax deadline
loomed even clearer;
no more time
to distract with poems,
even this one a lazy
fingering, extracting juice
from the rind of past fears,
raising arms to God
to say thank you
for your intervention.
But what’s ten minutes
to a poet avoiding reckoning
with the IRS? Only ten
minutes to say thanks,
to say I love you and keep
in touch always. Ten minutes
to say tomorrow will come—
it already has—
despite the terrible words
and bombs exploded
until now in the latest
killing fields
of our one Earth
lit by the rising Sun seen
now for the first time
by the Artemis crew,
from the dark side
of the Moon.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.
