Quarantine, Day 23: A poem

Quarantine, Day 23

It moved too fast, the spreading darkness

A scythe, brushing past me, snagging others

At first a distant taunt

Then an exponential climb

Robber of breath and the wisdom of ages,

wisdom we never passed on

because we weren't ready to need it

Instead we loitered in pajamas

Gorged ourselves with a streaming feed

Of digitized rants and marching graphs and farcicality

Gluttons for the mass trauma of the outside world, for any reminder 

that out there there are people, that this is real.

And when we had fed ourselves sick,

We could not sit still, so we paced

The mania restless in our bones,

Occasionally scrubbing things.

We already knew that we had run from stillness,

that we should have been home more before all this,

to watch the radishes grow

and the children.

And then, with it rapping at the window,

We wondered if being walled in, screened off

with no way of helping

Was some kind of justice 

We waited in the gloom that seemed to seep from our pores

Waited for the virus to pass through our cells like a ghost

Waited for the poverty of souls it would leave in its wake

Held books in our hands with good intentions

Just staring at the page

At least it was Spring--

and in the sunlight the buds and the greens and the falcons didn't even seem to notice

that the people of the earth were alone

in their collective grieving

and that their fear feels an awful lot like a sore throat

How can the sunlight just sit there?  

--by Anita Fairbanks