When COVID19 hit, an idea leapt into my head of writing poetry to friends and family about their experiences of living through this time. I asked ten people I know a series of short requests about the emotions, memories, sounds and images they had on a particular day. As an offering, I wrote each of them a poem.

PART OF WHERE THE POEM CAME FROM
Emotions: Hope, melancholy, connectedness
A memory and sounds I heard were Romanian pop songs from my parents youth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyYY4craZ5k&feature=share

LETS NEVER FORGET TO LOVE THE ROSES
​
​My friend sends me her parents’
favourite song. It sounds like a tango
from their youth in Romania. Days when a
dictator ruled and the living room was a ballroom
of freedom.
 
In her home, on the other side of the world
nothing is lit, not even the lights, and the picture
frame where their portrait sits rests in her lap.
 
Outside it is spring, or the hint that
something could change. What was buried
under ice, is surfacing –
buds, old dog shit, plastic bags and lost keys.
 
When she packed up their house
she held objects to remember
them by. An ashtray, a teacup.
 
Memories lay in the weight
and shape of things.
 
Fingers feel their way over strings,
play songs we knew and songs
we remember
in our bodies.
 
The streets are strange and silent.
Walks reserved for dogs who sense
the world is pausing a while,
lift a leg to pee
 
sniff the ground as though to say
it’s all here, it’s all here
beneath our feet.

HYMN OF THE BIG WHEEL
​
By the canal, a boat is moored.
It rests without sails, like an old
Dutch painting, windless and stationary.
 
The path by the creek winds
with the rush of spring, opened
up by bird song. My russet dog
 
sniffs a trail of all those who came
before – inhaling the weight of centuries.
He runs as free as a soul released
 
from a body. When I walk with him
in these strange, long, heavy days
I feel the same. A sympathetic
 
displacement of myself into a
dog’s body, some kind of
transspecies transference.
 
The crunch and snap of twigs
underfoot and I’m back in a café
at a time when we could sit face
 
to face, convene over a coffee
wait all day for what we needed
lean in a little closer.
 
The way the earth leans
now, on its axis
so I can hear you breathing
 
all of you, out there
in your silences.

JUST WAVING
​
Someone else is living in my house
the house of my childhood.
 
On the Zoom call, I am connected to 14
people doing genealogical research.

My address comes up and one of the
participants, it turns out, lived in it.
 
In my house. The one I dream about
even drive past sometimes, pausing.
 
The one I lived in as a child and so will
always live in deeply, in a way I cannot explain.
 
We are lined up on the screen like thumbnails
of our former selves. Showered and preened
 
for viewing during a lockdown. It’s in a marriage
record that I see the address again. My house.
 
That one on the hill with the heavy wooden door
and the gables and the echoes of misery
 
through the halls. Where I laughed in a garden on
an outside swing and my father loved me
 
until I was three and my neighbour friend met me
in the park and we walked to lessons and
 
she was so slow, is still so slow in her
own way. That house. I still think of it as mine.
 
The only people I see now are on screens
or through screens.
 
The grocery worker I waved to this morning
as he loaded my produce into the trunk.
 
Thank you, I mouthed through the rear-view mirror
or maybe just to myself. Thank you.
 
The Queen is addressing the Commonwealth
she looks tired but assured, as always.

Her hair perfectly in place, her son
recovering from Covid19, all must be well.
 
Outside the plane window it is dark,
the oval a portal of memory.
 
I fly back from Australia, the other side
of the world, the other side of the moon, now.
 
The silence of rocketing through space. It is so dark and
quiet. The world seems impossibly connected
 
up here. Time suspended and the rush of muted
engines, the sound of air filtered through ducts, and
 
the sleeping passengers, who haven’t yet learned
they will be grounded soon, for a long time.

WELCOME TO A NEW DAY

If the cherry tree were in blossom like this always,
maybe we would not weep at the losses
 
the silences.
 
How a boat moored in the harbour is
quiet now. A friend inside it, or not
 
inside it
 
eats dumplings, sips soup, sleeps away
from the people she loves in case
 
by breathing
 
too closely on their soft skin,
too near to be safe
 
she kills them.
 
A white bloom is sudden, a shock
of life, like birth, like the birth
 
of a little girl
 
in my arms, something uncertain
and beautiful as a cloud
 
or the sun
 
triumphant from behind
a cloud. “Welcome to the world”
 
I told her
 
welcome to a new day.
 
And now, two people in dinosaur
suits rush past on
 
rollerblades
 
when the rest of the world
has stopped moving.

​EGGS
 
If you had kept me in the loop
I would never have had to say
 
out loud how               this moment
broke us open
 
the sound of a male cardinal
in the yard. The muffled ring of
the telephone
                                    in the other room.
 
Our dog scratching at every closed
                        door
 
in the hopes that something
would give way           and crack
 
like the eggs our chickens
brood on and warm
 
like the time                you cried
a rutted thing that
did not know how       to mend
 
I tried to tell you the difference
between ‘loot’ and
                        ‘loop’
 
and the feedback wasn’t
good. I snapped          a synapse
with a sound, mislaid your
 
heart in            my palm
 
we warm our bodies on top
of the chicken coop now
 
all cooped up
 
laid bare in the            feedback
loop, we get the message
 
the world might
need to                        heal
a while