Photo courtesy of KLCC
I put on a shirt today with red and blue stripes
bordering a sea of white, and wrapping my legs
a pair of blue jeans, my hair black as crows
that cawed in boyhood mornings in the far-
away island where I first tasted America
in glasses of bright orange kool aid neighboring
girls offered us after play. They were daughters
of an American diplomat, straw blonde migrants,
whose ancestors left Sweden and Norway to till
the American plains, now showing a Tamil boy
the latest inventions of that promised land where
the since discovered and devouring darkness
was covered up in grand scenes of
conquering man and howling natives.
I cheered those cowboys on the screen
sported a toy pistol and insisted my younger
brother play the Indian. Life has since taught
me how to be the Indian, the man without
arms, brown-skinned man, native whose
symbiotic dance with herbs, trees
and buffalo rudely exploded. Buffalo roam
still in a few national parks. In Sri Lanka
a few thousand elephants remain forging
already trod paths. We can only pick up
where we find ourselves to build a society
more in keeping with the sap of our dreams,
that promise inherited from seers,
revolutionaries, in violence, in civil
disobedience, in tragedy and in swift passage
of laws during the periods of mourning,
of reconciliation, after Kennedy, King,
Tiruchelvam, Kumaratunge, Write
the names of peacemakers in these verses
Remember them today as we celebrate
the return of the Dream, President Joe Biden
and Vice President Kamala Harris at his side,
fully empowered and glorious Indian,
Jamaican and American, the last voice
in the room, the next in line.