Three months ago I started a file of Pandemic Poems.
Words rushed in and writing was both compulsion and comfort. I wasn't trying to "say something” but keeping my head above water in the only way I knew, by writing it out.
But now an entire season has passed. How do we call this a phase? We're not only in a pandemic, but in a seismic shift of actions, attitudes, systems. This is mental, emotional, and cultural change.
Now every poem carries the strain.
Things are hard, things are easy. I make them so, or, I make the best. Can these statements be both true and false, and at the same time?
I don’t know what to say or share, how to tell this story. Language fails. And still I keep talking. Language is a secret everyone is keeping, writes Rebecca Lindenberg in Catalogue of Ephemera.
My mind is a crowd gathered too close. All day and into night, the sky is the same static gray. Is this winter or summer? Slumber or resignation? I am not sick and not noticeably sad. Maybe this is surrender.
It's not enough to love and wish and poem and pray.
All over this neighborhood now, nothing happens. Stillness. A few walkers, like me, heads down, crossing before approach.
There's little room left for another sorrow.