Poems in the time of Corona
Marking time
How change arrives on supersonic wings.
Disaster flies at you, striking
before the boom of its approach.
Recovery plods behind, an exhausted
steeplechaser drenched in liquid mercury.
Isolated and restrained, the time from
Monday morning to Monday lunchtime
is stretched to a week in the rack.
Scribbled wish lists and to-do lists crumble,
giving way like ancient papyrus
to the sharp strike-through of cancelled plans.
In frustration, we grab time by the neck
to interrogate today about tomorrow,
but time won't squeal,
and so we beat and frogmarch time outside
to shoot it as we would a rabid cat,
then hurry back to find time has escaped
again and faces us on all sides
with the delirious tick of a thousand
atomic, quartz, and mechanical clocks.
Support a poet. Buy a book.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems
Marking time
How change arrives on supersonic wings.
Disaster flies at you, striking
before the boom of its approach.
Recovery plods behind, an exhausted
steeplechaser drenched in liquid mercury.
Isolated and restrained, the time from
Monday morning to Monday lunchtime
is stretched to a week in the rack.
Scribbled wish lists and to-do lists crumble,
giving way like ancient papyrus
to the sharp strike-through of cancelled plans.
In frustration, we grab time by the neck
to interrogate today about tomorrow,
but time won't squeal,
and so we beat and frogmarch time outside
to shoot it as we would a rabid cat,
then hurry back to find time has escaped
again and faces us on all sides
with the delirious tick of a thousand
atomic, quartz, and mechanical clocks.
Support a poet. Buy a book.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems
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