A friend texted to say it’s irresponsible to protest during a pandemic. All those people
crowded together become vectors for the virus, which doesn’t care about race. I hadn’t
thought of Covid-19 as post-racial, the enlightened bug.
The last thing he saw was the joy in her eyes.
Back home the flowers have wilted and the balloon,
twisting slowly in the now-stale air,
sinks lower and lower to the ground.
I so want to be optimistic and airy, to write of
our generous spirit, to wax poetic about moon landings
and beach landings, entrepreneurship, sliced bread,
the assembly line, the World Wide Web. It feels un-American
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes
that would tax me: I need nothing from the State, and so
give nothing to the State.
I hope it’s not too late to stop the carnage.
America forgives itself so easily, as
though we weren’t forgiving but forgetting.
“How does one with no boots
pull himself up by his bootstraps?”
“Why teach someone to fish
then deny them access to the lake?”
I just read that the virus is mutating, anti-vaxxers are joining other unsavory elements to protest public health measures, the president doesn’t see the need for mass testing but is now getting tested daily…
I have lingered too long on the intricacies of bark and root,
of trees as leap into the inverted bowl of a sky I cannot lick,
named comets and coined mythologies while the masters
of commerce discussed business in the other room.
It is late-April 2003 and I’m well enough to bathe. Mom draws
the bath, peels off clothes and bandages. A month of sweat and blood
disappears in eddies of soap and steam. Civilians cower in fear—
I confess to undemocratic meditations:
If Bin Laden had sought instead
to save the world,
what would he have hijacked?