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Inauguration

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: Kamala Harris is sworn as U.S. Vice President by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor as her husband Doug Emhoff looks on at the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. During today's inauguration ceremony Joe Biden becomes the 46th president of the United States. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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.

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