Karpagam “Jeeks” Rajagopal

Louisville  Colorado, USA

Literary biography: Born and raised in India, and currently living in the United States, Jeeks is a librarian, logophile, and aspiring writer.

Poem written:  30th April 2020

A new world order

“Enough” was an obscenity. More! More! was always better.

With rapacious avarice, we padded life with layers of redundancy,

with wants mutating into needs, luxuries becoming essentials

incorporated seamlessly into our lives, new normals established over time,

things we thought we couldn’t live without, till one day, a little virus schooled us.

It started as an unknown in a faraway land, striking with deadly timing,

a globular alert of mankind’s folly as we rampaged and ravaged

all that we touched. Rumor quickly transformed to lives lost,

as a willing, wily, interspecies hitchhiker, invisible, airborne, shape-shifter immigrant

sought new bodies to subjugate, and new social mores to impose.

Self-appointed, self-anointed royalty, it rapidly felled established bastions,

curbing nations, continents, leaders, and untrammeled greed,

bringing economies to their knees, and redefining the concept of might.

Forcing house arrest, clearing vast peopled tracts, it silently issued diktats,

demanding redress for oppressed earth, countering defiance with infection and death.

A microscopic fiend exposes our follies, redefining “necessities”, reawakening

longings and whims once easy to indulge, now impossible logistic nightmares.

As we adjust to a new world order, with clearing skies, and healing earth,

home cooking, family, innocent pastimes, simple pleasures, a return to basics,

our essentials now whittled down to “Be safe and well”, “Are you OK?”, “I love you”.