Antidote
37
on an Easter
pandemic Sunday,
Timid not triumphant,
an ailing alleluia
this year.
All of us waiting ripe for
resurrection of the
holy
personal calendar.
In time,
repentance. I
recall only
blankly baking cake
on a lark,
three layers and
your three years.
Darling dove.
Earth is solid under you,
every face friendly.
Like me,
when airplanes
did not crash into buildings
on purpose.
Tittering sweetly
my sing song sparrow,
I soak in your sound
and grins unburdened
by grief,
chubby arms
smeared sticky with
pink buttercream.
37
A forgettable number
but for this interruption, a
heavy, hallowed stillness.
Shattered.
Made whole,
together.
April in America
Spring will still come this year.
No one thought to tell her that it has been scrapped,
like all the other things.
Her calling cards are scattered about
in the tiny green buds, twittering birds, a rising smell of wet earth and warm grasses.
Yes, the evidence is plain.
Spring will still come.
They park the refrigerated trucks outside a hospital in New York City.
Instead of holding the cakes and milk and cheeses of ordinary times,
they are filling them with people.
Sancta Maria! A nightmare of a place for the virus to take hold.
Crowded air thick with contagion.
They say there are not enough incinerators in Manhattan.
They do not say “incinerator” on television.
He says, but if only someone could have known. Who could have known?
How could a dull man who has only seen seas parting for him
grasp this tsunami?
Masks, swabs, gowns, gloves, tanks, drugs, ventilators, morgues, incinerators, plots.
Not enough! Not enough! Not enough!
Doctors and nurses led like lambs to the Easter slaughter.
Now the only way out is through.
In the suburbs we jog by empty schools.
We watch the stock market fall like lead. They begin at once-
Rugged individualism. Personal responsibility. Dog eat dog. Cut bait. Fittest survive.
A flavor of cruelty as American as barbeque and fireworks and lynching.
Kicking bodies into gutters on Wall Street, never missing a beat.
We slide too easily into this dystopia. Darkness trails mankind like a shadow.
This falcon has no falconer.
Spring has come.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 