It Is Possible

An auspicious moment, the first seizing of inspiration, the birth of a column. The Voice of the Port appears here in English at a time of great hope and optimism despite the ravages of the pandemic. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are leading the return of the Dream to both the American and the world’s imagination. Every fortnight I will open the doors of the port and let a poem go forth and take its chances in the democracy restored.

In love and poetry

-Indran Amirthanayagam

 
It Is Possible

We are celebrating everywhere. The force, the beauty
of his speech, the call to end uncivil war caught me
in a spell. When I wrote my history of the Sri Lankan
conflict I called it Uncivil War. Now my president
has taken the expression to apply it to my adopted
country. I could not have imagined that fleeing
one civil war I would end up in another, that
I would be led by hazard or destiny to live
two voyages of the comet, two conflagrations,
two attacks against symbols of order and law.
I could not have imagined either that my attempts
at love would not end up in the daily sharing
of food, of intimate and stretched out conversation.
But I have discovered another way to tie a fifth leg
to the cat, to write every day in all my languages,
to talk with people here and there in the place
of my wife, to live on a border between
languages, loves, tastes, memories. Pessoa
would say “it is my way of being alone.”
I say that I am made of the food you give me
as my father wrote to his wife. Who are you,
my reader, my sister? Ah, tradition, phrases
learned by heart, the fear of copying them.
How can I say that I need your caresses,
that I am exhausted by my pastoral ministry,
that I am also a man made of desires,
of needs. But it does not matter. This is
a day for a national party, the return of
the Dream, American possibility.

 January 21, 2021

Image: Anandan Amirthanayagam