“If I should meet thee / After long years, / How should I greet thee? / With silence and tears.”

For Poetry Monday:

Corona Diary, Cornelius Eady

These days, you want the poem to be
A mask, soft veil between what floats
Invisible, but known in the air.
You’ve just read that there’s a singer
You love who might be breathing their last,
And wish the poem could travel,
Unintrusive, as poems do from
The page to the brain, a fan’s medicine.
Those of us who are lucky enough
To stay indoors with a salary count the days
By press conference. For others, there is
Always the dog and the park, the park
And the dog. A relative calls; how you doin’?
(Are you a ghost?) The buds emerge, on time,
For their brief duty. The poem longs to be a filter, but
In floats Spring’s insistence. We wait.


From Together in a Sudden Strangeness edited by Alice Quinn, an anthology of pandemic poetry published last month.

---L.

Subject quote from When We Two Parted, The Byron.