Lockdown lesson I

Credit

I follow the stories. Most stories don’t

have pleasant endings, or even beginnings,

written in happy-go-lucky, squiggly fonts.

Year round extra judicial killings.

Some will make it to the headlines, most won’t.

This peaking death in the middle of spring.

Losses that happen and are telephoned.

The rollbacks, the undemocratic stirrings.  

On the plus side, there’s always one, I’m told -

managed to learn a whole new heap of things:

crash course on firming up the pain threshold;

these so called linings of silver and gold

are exactly that – heightened imaginings.

Positive, and its dire, negative meanings.

Breathless

Credit

I’ve read somewhere – a prophet spent

forty days in the wilderness.

A pair of brothers were absent

for fourteen years more or less.

In strange, nested mythologies,

passages marked in sands and wars.

And in here-n-now territories

time buckles under tormentors.

I heard the empty vessels wreck

my world, too close their keels and teeth.

Saw too, a knee pressed on a neck

and shut my eyes, forgot to breathe.

The mills, I’ve heard, grind small but slow –

how many more aeons to go?

Allusions and a Lockdown Mantra

Keep listening to the birds, and the crickets,

watching for star reflections in buckets,

though the present is a box full of darkness

remember it’s still a gift and nothing less.

The sky never had a limit, and the ground

is hallowed everywhere, even torn and browned,

even when it's sullied with a pandemic

of deceit and a tsunami of plastic.

When it’s ruthlessly mauled by a cyclone;

the warming of seas, the holes in the ozone.

Lay your skin close to the asphalt and concrete

and under them feel the seasonal heartbeat.

Thirteen ways are good, but you don’t always need

thirteen, one is enough, the rest is just greed.

Let them eat some cake!

How many hearts have been crushed in these fifty days

how many pairs of feet have walked the national highways

and how many lives were sliced open on the rail tracks

how many children starved as their parents trudged back

the unbalconied people who'll go anywhere

and work everything from harvesters to daycare.

Well, there's no vote this year - is that the reason why

you talk about bells-n-petals, and let them die?