Your saviors have landed, blue eyes bright with compassion and rapacity.
Your saviors know all about your country’s bittersweet melisma, three thousand year blood feuds, and rickety cotton-looms: They were briefed on the flight over.
All about your country, including where each lithium deposit hides, pulsing like the sweetmeat heart inside an orphan.
You have so much injustice here: Your rich are richer than your poor, and your women have to wear clothes. Won’t it be wonderful to be free?
You don’t have a problem with freedom, do you?
Your saviors do not disembark from the plane immediately. The in-flight movie hasn’t finished yet.
Your prime minister waits to greet them on the tarmac, hands folded in front of his crotch, head down, as though waiting for a beating.
Authentic traditional dancers in authentic traditional costumes wheel a staircase to the plane door.
The local trumpets play their national anthem, not yours.
Your saviors have degrees in international affairs—what can you possibly teach them about a country no bigger than a battery?
Not a car battery either. One of those disposable cylinders the size of a chain gun round.
Your country needs saving. The way forward is to grant your saviors power.
The way forward. That is, the way out of backwardness. The way to join the future. To join the global community. To become modern.
To be saved.
Your saviors are full of compassion for your lithium deposits.
Your saviors have descended from the skies to introduce justice to all your natural resources equally.
Don’t keep your oil oppressed underground.
Your saviors will save you so hard your granddaughters will grow up speaking vocal fry.
Fiberglass mushroom satellite dishes will sprout on the decay of your religion. You’ll nibble one and hallucinate Disney+.
Your saviors have a five year plan and a thirty year mortgage all thought out for you.
Eyes as blue as opium poppies harvested by orphans in authentic traditional costumes.
Goods and services in the service of the greater good. In the service of saviors better and greater than you.
Descending from the heavens with a contract for your prime minister to sign in ink as blue as opium poppies growing in a trumpet bell.
Now close your patriarchal eyes and open your oppressive mouth.
There won’t be a war if you don’t fight back.
Take your salvation like a good little people.
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things my Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026).
More information at amitmajmudar.com.