Love in the time of Corona – locked down
Love in the time of Corona – locked down
It is a time of suffocation.
Under boots and knees
In blood and water
Behind masks and machines
By speaking and silencing
Deaths through which we cannot accompany each other
Beyond virtual spaces, bought from billionaires
Who rent us the freedom to be sold.
Suffocation of the spirit
Where we teach our children
How not to die by touching
My children might learn more from me
By the embracing and letting go of love
Than by this clinging
to a singular fear
And the flinging away of imagination.
The world on my phone
and out of my window imagines ways
to survive apart.
To face death or spread death in defiance
Of decrees and data
I no longer know how
To be. With.
I would forego 50 people at my funeral for one at my bedside with a bare hand and a book.
My son holds a smooth rock revealing the layers of the ages in colours of crushed sand.
It symbolises re-creation, the constant flux in which elements transform and carry each other from air to water, earth to fire, sand to stone and stardust.
Stories of what is gone but remains
Told in elemental waves of sound and sediment
Tones and pauses spelled in a pattern-language
Of bubbles and light.
We are layered upon each other.
Generation after generation Pressing each other back into carbon
That may reconfigure as diamond lives and deaths.
I spent my morning seeking synonyms when what I really lacked was cinnamon.
I made pancakes with rhymes and caramel.
My child smiled that none of them was sweet enough.
I am sorry I cannot make this sweeter, my love.
It is the space around me and the space around you.
Into this space I dare not spread one germ
For fear it germinates.
I stand alone and wheeze
Grateful there is no one on my neck
Relieved the world could see at least one knee
And screamed together
I cannot breathe.
June 2020
