COVID Poem #3 – Social Distancing Sonnet

We keep apart six feet. We’ve lost intimacy.
A sickness that has come is keeping you from me.
So strange to stand so far when we were face to face,
I miss your tender touch as well your warm embrace.
The stats are counting up, we’ve each an end to bear
this ghostly breath against the gloves and masks we wear.
But it’s the space we give that’s keeping us as one.
A gorge of love and hope to see through this is done.
And time will side with us, provided we are strong,
to distance when it’s right, to fix what has gone wrong.
A heart sustaining heart, life and life on tether.
By keeping us apart, it’s keeping us together.

Okay, a little emotional, a little soppy (or quite soppy). I suppose I am. Although it feels strange to keep your distance from people, especially those you love, there’s this overwhelming sense of Team Humanity when people work the measures put in place. There really is a huge shared effort to, as everyone is putting it, #StopTheSpread – and it’s bloody beautiful! I had a thought the other day (one that led to this poem) that it’s as if there’s this invisible thing between us. Like a long table, a bench or something, a nasty virus one, and it’s stopping us from our usual hugs, close chats, intimacies, thumb wars. But it’s also something we’re agreeing to manage together, to manoeuvre around, to shuffle to one side and let someone pass, to give each other safe breathing space. It goes against what we’re used to, but staying away and keeping distant is translating clearly to ‘Let’s play it safe. We can make up the high fives when this is all blown over.’

I don’t know. Virus tables? My newly accrued lockdown mentality madness is convinced there’s some sense there.

Keep safe everyone!

COVID Poem #2 – Fog

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.

COVID Poem #1 – Set

I left work today. “We should be home,”
I said, concerned about sharing tools,
the communal shed. Non-essential stuff,
I shrug, and ask if he will leave as well.

The grass grows, the crops need watering,
the weeds green between – I have to, he vows.
Pandemic. Sanitise. Just sounds to him, dissipating,
lost to breeze, birdsong, and spade hitting stone.

He bends down, unearths it with both hands.
What’s that doing in there, he mutters, and lugs
it to one side, then falls back down to work.

The picture is still there. I can’t shake it: a man
and his sweat married to soil, the sun pressed at his neck.