ANOTHER 9/11

As American alchemy transforms

Third-world sweat and blood

into their Starbucks and McDonald’s,

and builds empires upon the debris

of war-torn nations,

buying bread with bullets,

so the 9/11s of Chile, Egypt and the Jews of Nazi Germany*

get erased along with the fall of the Berlin Wall,

To make way for the 3000 dead in New York

on an azure September morning.

All lives are not equal.

Yesterday, on November 9, America waved into the

world’s gobsmacked visage

a racist, misogynistic, hate-spewing Trump card:

That too was a 9/11. For the rest of the world.

Yesterday, we had a 9/11 that crashed the

economy, converting coveted notes into

paper and nothing more.** As banks and ATMs shut down,

as if in mourning, and social media brimmed

with Trump-struck woe,

I felt for a moment the world shared in my grief—

A humongous pathetic fallacy—

My own 9/11 that splintered my days

into before and after, hijacked my life and

flew it into the skyscrapers of

Ceaseless Avarice, to burst into flames,

To hurtle down sans grace,

And to splutter in the ashes, facedown in muted sorrow:

Tragedy must be a class act, or spectators get bored;

No listeners for a broken piano, so you better soar.

A wannabe phoenix, this was my 9/11.

NOTES:

*Refers to the US-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 and the bloody dictatorship that followed; the signing of the Camp David Accords that signalled Egyptian and Arab humiliation on September 11, 1979; and the Kristallnacht pogrom by Nazis upon German Jews on 9 November 1938.

**On 9^th November 2016, 500 and 1000 rupee notes were demonetized in India, leading to widespread panic among the common man and bringing the economy to a stand-still