The American poet Cornelius Eady has co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation, a non-profit organisation that serves black poets in the United States.

Recently, Eady composed a poem for a fellow poet, killed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US law enforcement agency, in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 7, 2026. She was a 37-year-old white American woman, a mother of three. The poem titled: ‘Renee Nicole Good is Murdered’ ends with the following lines:

“There is a picture of her/ Just before it tips rancid,/ Just before she’s dragged/ Into how they see her/ I wish I could read the words./ As they blaze their last, unsuspected/ Race through her skull./ A language poem that ends on/ The word/ Impossible.”

In 2020, Renee Nicole Macklin Good won the poetry prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poem ‘On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.’ The opening lines read:

“I want back my rocking chairs,/ solipsist sunsets,/ & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches. /i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores/ (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp —/ the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind): …”.

She later says: “now i can’t believe —/ that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths ‘make room for wonder’ —”

Her friends as well as some creative artists in the US see Good as a poet who bore witness to the strongarm tactics employed by agencies like ICE to intimidate and oppress common people, which included her neighbours and fellow citizens.

Good was not killed for writing poetry or for being queer or for any other identity marker that she possessed. The ICE agent who fired at her three times and shot her to death must have had no idea that she was a poet.

ICE officials are accused of particularly going after those who are perceived to be immigrants by their accent, skin colour, behaviour or attire. All is taking place at the behest of the current populist, right-wing Trump administration sitting in Washington DC, blatantly promoting racism, misogyny and McCarthyism within the US, besides applying neo-colonial and neo-imperial tools of commercial, financial and military suppression to dominate and control the rest of the world — from Latin America to the Middle East and Asia.

Good was not killed for writing poetry or for being queer or for any other identity marker that she possessed. The ICE agent who fired at her three times and shot her to death must have had no idea that she was a poet. Apparently, she lived a somewhat nonconformist — if not defiant — life, going by the conservative social standards observed in the part of the world she inhabited. But the officers would not have known that either. The only explanation is that an innocent citizen was killed by a law enforcer through a completely avoidable and excessively disproportionate response by the state.

After the incident, it was reassuring to see that the mayor of Minneapolis stood by Good and other victims of ICE. At the same time, a large number of protesters took to the streets in Minneapolis and other cities across the US, in solidarity with Good and to deplore the Trump administration’s current discriminatory policies, coupled with the use of unacceptable violent means to coerce and silence individuals and communities.

However, in current times, most civil society struggles waged in different countries and in different circumstances have made limited impact, due to the absence of a larger and more inclusive economic and political agenda in which they can situate themselves. Issue-based movements are no less important, but they focus on one issue and somehow ignore the larger picture.

In our region, the so-called youth-led movements that brought down governments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal could destroy but had no brick and mortar to reconstruct a new structure in place of the edifice that they razed. There are a few other similar examples from the recent past.

Unfortunately, there is an absence of such ideological political parties or, to give some latitude, maybe only a few functioning anywhere in the world that draw strength from contemporary theoreticians — at national, regional, continental or global levels. A critical mass of progressive intellectual and political leadership is not visible that can collectively, or by supporting each other in different parts of the world, define and lead the long-term struggle for a transition from an unjust and oppressive global order to the one that is just and egalitarian.

By no means is one suggesting that it is the end of the world and there will never be any brave voices that are also powerful enough to be effective or that informed and knowledgeable people’s movements are not possible that can change the polity. What I want to arrive at is the point that there is a dire need to create and strengthen such movements from local to global levels on the basis of our sense of history, the demands of the present and a vision for the future.

US Vice President J.D. Vance, while declaring full immunity for the ICE agent who killed Good, called her “a deranged leftist.” Such ‘deranged leftists’ include poets, writers and artists across the world. They need to come together, reflect and act in the way artists are supposed to act when global power has gone to the dogs.

The writer is a poet and essayist. His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 18th, 2026