April is Poetry Month and the world is in quarantine. Considering the situation, it seemed appropriate to mine our local poets for their perspectives on coronavirus/COVID-19 and philosophies of life.
Longtime resident and artist, Valerie Walsh, who created the springtime ”paper sculpture” that adorns our cover, also created the spot illustrations here.
Visions
I’m seeing things.
Only one duty remains,
to love this world.
I feel like a cup with no bottom,
one of my Mom’s china cups,
a blue vine chased around the rim,
not a super-sized mug,
but a cup to indulge a moment,
an absolute instant filling the heart
with forest thunder, the forest same
where Buddha found enlightenment,
in the country with no walls,
where leaves clap.
All I can do is love this world
in accord with the time
as I sit, pouring tea,
seeing things, cup by cup,
knowing all I can do is continue
to pour, bottomless,
to set my neighbor free.
—Ann Buxie
Complications
She tells me to take off my shirts
for my mammography.
I follow her to a locker room
where I undress my top half
and put on a robe.
She tells me to put my shirts in a locker.
I face a bank of lockers.
Reminds me of P.E. class.
There are directions on the locker.
You have to turn a small handle
to point to a red dot.
Then open and put your stuff in.
Then shut the door and input
a four-digit code to re-open.
Then remember the code.
And remember the number of your locker.
That’s, too many complications.
And I’m stuck, in front of a locker,
intended to safeguard my shirt.
I wonder, can’t I just carry my shirt with me?
As if it never occurred to her,
she said I could.
I need saving every day.
—Ann Buxie
There is far more than the human dilemma involved here. Maintaining a real and vibrant connection—to spirit, beauty, art, the natural world, all beings, each other—matters, not only because we will be sustained during such hard times of isolation, but also because we may be led to make the changes that will allow us to go on (but surely not in the old harmful ways).
Now That We Know
Now that we are sequestered,
an entire globe aware
we are sharing a common fate,
which has always been the case,
now that we, so frightened
without our things,
know we are all mortal,
while grabbing our last meals
from the emptying shelves,
imagining our last suppers,
how we will spend
the final weeks of our lives,
Now that we are aware
that the gift of breath
we have always received from the trees
may not serve us —
Is it because we
relentlessly cut them down?
Now that Water,
who is one of the Immortals,
is dying at our hands,
but without planning
for Her last waves and tides,
is remaining Water
for whoever swims within her,
And now that Air,
another threatened Deity
is still holding whatever birds yet fly,
and Earth, Great Mother,
is continuing despite
all her open wounds,
is remaining Earth,
and Fire, Oh!
He will burn and burn
until every tree,
or the very sun, goes out,
Now that we have succumbed
to each other’s downfall,
no difference, no differences,
and we, the ones who have done
such great harm, who tried
to rival the Gods
with all our weapons,
are taken down
by the most invisible and minute,
the very littlest one,
such is our common jeopardy,
our fate,
Now that we know we are mortal,
might we, for this just moment,
hold a broken prayer,
that our hearts open wide
and with such wisdom
that Life will pity us,
will restore the thousand beings,
and give us another
humbler round.
—Deena Metzger