O America!

-          Manprasad Subba

 

O America!

Did you hear?

A young Nepali-speaking poet  

has blatantly named you a Coward.

 

Coward you are undoubtedly.

You would fear Vietnam as a ghost.

Now, Kim Jong Un is insomnia to you.

You, a heavyweight boxer,  

tremble with fear seeing a featherweight boxing champion

of a tiny island.

You fear the dark skin

as children fear the darkness of night.

You carry that fear in your knee

and at the first opportunity

your white fear comes down heavily

to press coldly the smooth dark neck.

 

Yesterday in broad daylight on a footpath  

you mercilessly white-kicked an Asian sister of mine.

Are you so much afraid

of the face coloured by the eastern sun?

 

In fact, your white skin is not white,

but faded with fear

and all the time scared of other colours.

Long ago when you came across those red faces,

with red blood running in them

you were so dangerously afraid

that until you drove them to near extinction

your white fear remained as lead with whiteness faded away.

 

Your white fear is so aggressive, so ferocious

it knows only to be aggressive.

(Fear eventually learns to be fearsome.)

Your huge eagle on the tower

eerily laughs in fear – Ku Klux Klan… Ku Klux Klan…

 

Dangling a handcuff at one side of your belt and a pistol on the other side,

do you want to do policing the entire world?

Police just the other form of fear that grips those in power.

You a policeman, Derek Chauvin,

on whose knee is tattooed the map of America

which is but stained with dark blot of George Floyd’s dark neck

and the size of that un-erasable black blot

has grown from Tennessee to Minneapolis.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. had once gone from Tennessee to Washington D.  C.

and created a rainbow of his dream

that arched across California and Virginia.

So afraid were you of that fragrant dream

you, hiding from all eyes, fired at the eyes of that dream

But Martin’s dream was already in the innumerable eyes

aflame with determination.

 

With your thirteen stripes, red and white,

you want to keep the whole earth bound and tied  

and those fifty stars clustered in a corner

blaze in such a way as to blind the eyes of the whole world.

 

Many say this is the power of America.

But I say --

What more terrible exposure of fear could there be than this?

            

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                                                                         April 01,  2021.