A Corona poem…just especially for you.

MARKING TIME – A POEM ON CORONAVIRUS & STAYING AT HOME

 

When the world is suddenly shuttered. The things that mark time —commuting to work, sending our kids to tution, meeting up with friends – suddenly gets rubbed out and vanish and time resembles a long unending road that seems to stretch right on into the far distance of the horizon. Theres a texture to this mood. It has a seamless quality some what like dropping out of the sky…. where one even feels untethered.

If you think about virtually everything about being gainfully human it really only involves ascribing a name and face and shape to time….for me. This is how I see For instance when I recall the birth of my son’s. It’s almost impossible not to play that same reel of my wife smiling somewhere in the movie screen in my head. Or when I recount Africa. Suddenly a knot of familiar faces appear before like ghost….And that’s really how we all mark the chastening passage of time by referencing it to people and occasions…and this is the reason why being suddenly confined and restricted is so profoundly disturbing as it renders our life shapeless. As not being able to mark time can only mean the passing of every minute, hour and day cuts like a knife. No one really knows when this lock down will be lifted. Or whether the virus will continue to ravage like some feral creature. For many who have the go thru the purgatory of financial turmoil…they don’t even know when they can feel safe again. And so many of us who suddenly find that we cannot mark time are suddenly compartmentalized in our own bubble of fears, anxieties and denial. Above all we remain largely captive to the faint memory of how life used to be….where we were once able to mark time with our loved ones and friends.

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