Our recent conversations have been through glass.
We stand outside, cupped hands around our eyes,
looking through the broad pane framing their living room.
There, the young family. Our nephew, a year old, sleeps.
And we all thought – what does he know?
Only the warm, isolated comfort of innocence,
where for a precious few months there is no one
at work and mornings smell of baked bread.
Hands wrung, the mother worries about his lack
of social interaction in these early years,
and the father calculates the sad seep of savings.
How many evenings a meal can be stretched?
A generation of newborns are in the same boat,
but it is us communicating across fences, roads,
windows, barriers between our common worlds,
with our breath fogging the glass.
Nesbit and Gibley 