New Verse News Extra: FOOTBAL WIRE, FINAL
by Indran Amirthanayagam
Lionel Messi kisses the trophy.
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We are exhausted and delirious throughout the continent, rising and falling as our team controlled the play and was facing an apparently easy and merited victory with less than fifteen minutes left and then we lost a penalty, and two minutes later a shot from Mbappe so powerful no goalkeeper could have stopped it; and our players are tired yet they must limp into injury time not letting any more goals, so the mini- match over thirty minutes can decide, and again we go ahead and then a loose Argentine hand touches the ball in the area, an accident, but that of course is irrelevant to destiny, and we are back in the penalty box and Mbappe does not miss. Tied now at three, we try and try but our last shots do not hit the net, and we are left to finish the match in the penalty box. Then our goalkeeper, Martinez, our final fortress, stops a French penalty, then another goes wide, and all the Argentines score with precision. The game is won, the World Cup won. We are tired and barely typing on the wire, the keyboard. But as eyewitnesses, poets, journalists, we have to write our impressions out.
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Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.