Happy New Year to our Nepalese
and Bengali communities!
Nava Barsha 2081
and Happy Pohela Boishakh!
—City of London post on X
(formerly Twitter), April 15, 2024
As it turns out,
I’m not shackled
to 2024. I can move through time
and put the past
behind me—
by becoming Nepalese.
I like the thought of
2081,
far removed
from the plague
of the early 2020s,
the culture wars,
the mass of humanity
at one another’s
throats, in every
battlefield, comment
section in sight.
It’s a leap of almost
sixty years, perhaps that
long-awaited step on
Martian soil, the moon base
we were promised
back in 1976,
and 9/11 but an octagon
of decades
in the dust.
I won’t say there’s flying cars,
every futurist and their robot
getting it wrong , since the days
of Elroy Jetson,
of Blade Runner
replicants,
no jump in our evolution,
elongated arms,
heads about to burst
from the enormity
of our brains;
our skins
haven’t blended
into grey, the apes
have yet
to revolt,
and religion
is still around
but that’s to be expected—
in Judaism, after all,
it’s 5784,
and it still
believes in God,
in some promised, Holy
Land, that manna
can fall from the clouds
(if we only pray
fervent enough),
that the sting of
Holocaust
wasn’t so long ago,
in fact still
in their century,
when every Jew
was put in boxcars
towards a “shower,”
a pair of striped
pajamas,
and even the Führer’s
Volkswagen
had yet to reach the sky.
Andreas Gripp
April 15, 2024
RF Image