A very slight revision of a response poem written 10 days into Lockdown as a contribution to Poetry Month in April.
I am a confirmed case
of poetry incomplete,
still wintering,
while the birds out there
are chirping,
way ahead of the curve,
perched on their high branches
notched with data points,
blithely unaware that all
human life beneath
has been reduced to
a series of spaced out pegs,
from front door to supermarket aisle.
My raison d’être
has dwindled from day to day,
to reflect a garden
gnome state lichened
by grief for those imperfect
lost normalities,
all tender hopes thrown
upon the compost heap
of the unplanted.
And what that exactly means
hasn’t quite sunk in yet.
The buses that rule our avenue,
keep to a circumscribed timetable,
ploughing a primrose path
in each direction,
their skeletal insides rattling,
we do not know who or what
they are carrying.
Perhaps one day,
when I’m in dire need
of extracorporeal inspiration,
they will be deployed
in droves to ferry
my poetic form,
each word wrapped
in cloudy polythene,
towards that triage bed
nested inside a numbered
cubicle not of my choosing,
in that vast warehouse
fitted out for a Scutari death,
at the end of a very long road.
**
lise colas 