New World Disorders

'Tis only sensible that no soothsayer had foreseen

This distraught saga of life and death, thus unseen

Such anomaly in effectuation of a broken system

Where working class begs, sans tools of negotiation

The millions dead, and the living that can't breathe

Waiting on survival alms, with rage they seethe

Their children left behind without classroom gadgets

Farmers tired of suicides, and to whom life besets

Some say unemployment has skyrocketed globally,

Forlorn graduates scamping underground, locally

Trillion dollars planned for wars and conquests

While the battle for minimum wage hike vanishes

Yet another year when Black lives did not matter

Racism alive, elitists thrive, rich adorned with power

Ongoing caste oppressions where feudalism's sustained

Dalits & majority's uprisings are violently suppressed

Kashmir in lockdown well before the pandemic headlines

Palestine in curfews, no matter the health guidelines

Incomparable is the class-society distancing measures

Gap-bridging not possible among the wealthy and the poor

Some may say the fateful twenty twenty shall too be gone

And with it, the curses of Covid and its causes unknown

As though magically, or through divine interventions

Maybe just a happy coincidence, calendar's fascination

Yet, next year will be more of the same; the year after too

Corona is not a metaphor, but it very well could be, too

If those who survive well and those who perish, be indicators

'Tis the capitalist, profiteering class that's the biggest virus.

-Saswat Pattanayak, Peoples’ Poet
New York, December 31, 2020