#FlattenTheCurve: Carnival Coming by Indran Amirthanayagam

I am telling you, carry the torch now: Kamau he gone, Derek before
him. But you are walking still on the Savannah and back to Belmont,
your belly flat, to spice the channa, stir cow heel into the soup. You
have always cooked your own food, writing perfect miniatures, stories
of little people in little houses with no back door, sea shaping island,
keeping lovers, hand in hand, on the beach. Now, the virus has entered
along with migrants and visitors. Everybody is afraid. Everybody
thinking where did this community hand-off begin. And you are there
saying stop sowing fear of the other, of the wide world beyond
the back door. Stop saying the Lord cometh Stop talking plague
and black death. But I am saying everybody so easily, and we without
a thought, blind to walls going up, fortress Europe, fortress Peru,
fortress United States. Politicians say these are temporary, to stop
SARS-Cov-2. But evil makes evil in its name, people blocked
from their dream, the promised land an illusion. What was
the world like I ask in 1999? What will our world become
after the vaccine, when planes start to fly and islands welcome
the necessary tourist dollars, and Benetton, world socialism
and the United Nations jostle to become fashionable
once more, and you walking the Savannah imagining
the next mask you will sew for the mother of all carnivals.

Indran Amirthanayagam (www.indranmx.com) writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published seventeen poetry collections thus far, including  The Migrant States (www.hangingloose.com), Coconuts on Mars (www.paperwall.in), En busca de posada (Editorial Apogeo, Lima, 2019) and Paolo 9 (Manofalsa, Lima, 2019). The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press) won the Paterson Prize. Uncivil War (Tsar/Mawenzi House) tells the history of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press) was written in the wake of the Asian Tsunami of 2004. Other books include Il n’est de solitude que l’île lointaine (Legs Editions), and Ventana Azul (El Tapiz del Unicornio). He directs Poetry at the Port in Silver Spring. He is on the Board of Directors of DC-ALT, an association of literary translators. He writes for the newspaper Haiti en Marche. Amirthanayagam has received fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony.