Stephen Mead
Release Us, Corona, O Viral Crown of Drops
If I love you is whispered to nestled collar bones or shoulders
do these bones resonate or only if love is felt by both
listener and speaker?
Once a simple clear glass of water was filmed with the word yes
written on its surface. Microscopes closed in disclosing the lucidity
of molecular health from that monosyllable’s common affirmation,
an enriched fresh oxygen component concentrated throughout.
The word no or one equally negative created an opposite effect.
Consider sensitivity as scientific and what elements humans are most
composed of, our flesh, a page for notations, our pores, parchment blotter
message after message canvasses like portraits and landscapes.
When the Holocaust camps were about to be liberated and prisoners,
if capable, fled out at the risk of being shot, so many, if they made it
to woods, left names, devotions, places to meet on scraps; paper or cloth,
for the trees to hold secret, like a forest of matchbooks waiting in case,
in case…so did bark and phloem take on what was sacred,
vouchsafe it for good whether found ever or not?
Pondering existence, what happens to us, is itself a forest of questions
life forms throughout time for the global horror houses
of twins vivisected by Mengele to the jungles, tropics, deserts, glades, flats
trafficked for commerce of all sorts from the vanishing indigenous,
the underground immigrants cartels process as oil, guns, drugs, sex…
Getting that picture requires shoring up souls as rocking figures
who’ve had bad news hold one another in a slow weeping waltz.
Getting that picture is to acknowledge the dawning shock that, after all,
pestilence might not spare us and gone centuries hence
will be all human remnants.
Fuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkk!
Faith plea against this. Faith speak, sing, plan, focus instead
on positive balance, a vision, lantern-lit from within
for here even in New York amid the whole world’s latest pandemic
queer, contrary spring is rising up in buds pushing through,
in pulsing bulbs as pop-ups, daffodil, tulip, crocus,
and these alms are armed against the pall, are multi-tasking
with bird, insect, rodent, so that the whole season glows
as waves of nature coursing, an earth resurgence
in our faces, our senses, our blood, hearts and guts.
—Submitted on 06/29/2020
Stephen Mead is the author of According to the Order of Nature (We Too Are Cosmos Made): Art and Text for Gay Spiritual Sensuality (CreateSpace, 2016), and other books of visual art with textual accompaniment. His poems have appeared in Literary Yard, Ink Pantry, A Little Poetry, Peacock Journal, Poetry Pacific, and other journals. He live in Albany, NY.
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