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.
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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. PART OF WHERE THE POEM CAME FROM Emotions: Powerlessness, empathy, tenacious in face of futility Song/Sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M9muYyYxhI 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. PART OF WHERE THE POEM CAME FROM Emotions: Unease, surprise. When a marriage record at an online meeting of 14 people showed that one of the attendees had purchased/lived in the house where I grew up. 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. PART OF WHERE THE POEM CAME FROM Emotions: Calm, frustration, joy Memory: A beautiful boat full of plants and flowers docked near our place. Walking along the pier several times, past that boat, and feeling how very quiet it was. 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. PART OF WHERE THE POEM CAME FROM Emotions: implicated, askew 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 |