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 on your knees
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 colored by the eastern sun?

In fact, your white skin is not white
but faded with fear
and all the time scared of other colors.
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 its 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 on one side of your belt and a pistol on the other side,
do you want to do policing to 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 DC
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?

[Manprasad Subba (b. 1950) is a Nepali-speaking Indian poet of high repute. Known for his poems collected in ten collections, a few fictions, translations and critical writings, he has won several awards, including India’s prestigious Sahitya Academy Award. The discourse of marginality he initiated in Darjeeling Hills has inspired a lot of creative writings and research. He is also one of the advisers to The Gorkha Times. By profession, he is a lecturer of English literature in Darjeeling.]