A light-footed thief slipped into the night,
eager to devour our world.
Streets grew mute,
storefronts, smudged and empty.
The city resembled an abandoned stage,
void of spectacle and melody. The sidewalks
lost the shuffle-shout of crowds,
the buzz of traffic,
the clatter of commerce and sociability.
Despite the shriek of rails, a resonance
of tin lingered,
marking loneliness and isolation.
Occasionally, birds chirped louder
than sirens, a warning of Nature’s
dominant hand. The specter of doom
loomed over us.
We groped through a fog of confusion
and contradiction. Fear of the “other”
infected our gestures, “to mask or not to mask,”
a Shakespearean quandary.
We distanced from each other
with caution and suspicion.
We stayed home, maneuvering statistics
of death and dread.
Children, severed from their schools,
from grandparents and peers, suffered
the weight of alienation, deprived of play
and clay while office workers
huddled in their dens, lacking affirmation
and context. We relied on comedians for relief
and when they took a break, our hearts sank.
Laughter was our only condiment.
Teetering on the absurd, we weighed
the value of vaccines against the worth
of toilet paper. We shuttered and shuddered,
yearning to be rescued.
We mourned family and friends
whose lives were stolen with our tears.
We shook our heads
in bewilderment.
But there were those who could not afford
to wait or shelter, rushing to attend and serve,
the single mother who rose before dawn
to scrub and clean
who disinfected doorknobs and bed rails,
the caregivers who comforted and tended
to the elderly in rest homes. The bus drivers,
and train conductors
who transported factory workers, postal workers,
and teachers. The grocery shopper and truck driver
who delivered our food, the janitors
who swept, vacuumed and mopped
tirelessly to normalize our environment,
the paramedics, policemen, pilots
fire fighters, construction workers, trash
collectors and technicians,
the farmers, utility workers and support staffs
who secured our days and defined the meaning
of “essential.” The doctors and nurses
who worked overtime
with strained backs and blistered feet,
who denied burnout and despair, who labored
relentlessly
alongside exhausted scientists,
racing against the clock to discover
and distribute an antidote . . . the selfless
neighbors who knocked on doors to offer
aid and nourishment.
Champions, one and all, deserving
a Noble Peace Prize for defeating hardship
with good old fashioned
toil, innovation and altruism.
When we washed our hands of pessimism
and dried them off with new found knowledge,
silence broke— links to Zoom, revealed our faces
more than ever before—
We discovered that neither infection
nor geography could divide us, defeat us,
dim our promise or corrode our soul.
We stepped fresh into the air . . .
