The season that it was - Part Two

A poem from Now, about Then

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

April 2024, and I’m part of one of the Substack grouplets that are playing with daily writing prompts during National Poetry Month. “Write about an event in history,” one prompt suggests, and our group’s poems run the gamut from ancient Rome to the Freedom Riders. And then there’s me, who can’t manage to stumble any farther back than 2020.

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SHUTDOWN


It is coming, we were told.
It brings suffering and weakness and death.
What can we do? we asked, and were told,
Don’t worry. Only a handful,
the ones who would have anyway,
will suffer and weaken and die.

It is here, we were told.
Don’t worry, but stay inside.
No need to wear a mask, but stand apart
so no one’s skin or breath can touch you.
Don’t worry, but don’t call your doctor
unless you must; she’s busy these days.
Oh, and do wear a mask, if you can find one.

We stayed inside. We washed our hands.
We went to work and went to school onscreen.
We put toys in the windows to wave
at bewildered children taken for walks.
We set out snacks for delivery workers
and sanitized the packages they delivered.
We wrote hopeful poems
about fish in the Venice canals,
about birdsong lacing city skies,
about learning new ways to live.

We went to church and birthday parties onscreen.
We went to weddings and reunions onscreen.
We went to funerals onscreen.
We streamed videos onscreen
of mortuary storage vans, exhausted nurses,
apartments sealed by HAZMAT teams.
It was all that was happening, except
it wasn’t, so we streamed videos onscreen
of murder of marches of tear gas of speeches
of day-long lines of voters in their masks
of bare-faced rioters screaming to kill the votes.

It is over, we were told; here is prevention,
here is antidote, go live your lives again.
Don’t worry; yes, more have died
and are dying than we thought, more
have been made weaker, we all have suffered
one way and another, but it is time
to move forward move on move back
to the life we knew. Your country,
your employer especially, needs you
to move on. Don’t worry. It is over.
It is so very nearly over.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph. Took a few tries to get through it with my voice intact. You’re welcome.]

Please don’t mistake me, I’m profoundly grateful for the recovery that our country — our world — has made, since the worst of the pandemic. I understand something about the mix of motives that fuels our movement forward/on/back to the familiar. And at the same time there’s part of me wishing that, in the midst of that movement, we could all spend some time sitting still together in story circles … just long enough to really listen to what has changed: for the bereaved, for the immunocompromised and the people living with Long Covid, for school-aged children, for working parents, for healthcare professionals. Just long enough to name what each of us carried away from that time, so that we don’t sink under the weight of what we’re carrying while we try to stay in motion.

My thanks again to

Margaret Ann Silver

for offering her own poems from Then, and inspiring me (and others, I believe) to do likewise. Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a here-and-there version of one of those story-circles happening, as we’ve read and responded to each other’s work. I hope it helps us heal — all of us, poets and readers and passers-by. I hope it helps us to be brave, and to tell more stories.