Barbara Westwood Diehl
COVID-19 Abecedarian
After we were allowed to leave our houses, we
blinked at the unfamiliar sunlight like
children carried from a car in their sleep and waking somewhere
distant, a sandy beach with gulls crying overhead, or stars suddenly
everywhere in the sky and not a cotton sheet but grass below, or snow
falling on the ash of campfires, and all the parents
gone, leaving their children alone. We could not
help feeling lost on our own porches, helpless
in the mound of delivery boxes
just outside the door, flattened,
kept safely away for hours, still damp with
Lysol. We had forgotten what our neighbors looked like without
masks. We had learned to enjoy making and wearing the masks.
No need to smile, to engage, to observe or be
observed. We had been unfailingly
polite. We could not be otherwise. We became accustomed to extended
quiet. Accustomed to the crackle of computer speech, without
resonance, without the gut
sense of one body responding
to the touch of another body, no blood and bones
under our words, the muscle of our
voices gagged with bandanas.
We blinked like newborns and learned again, over time, the unbound
exuberance of children waking under stars, to crashing waves, campfires,
young again for as long as we could be young, no
zenith we could see.
—Submitted on 04/06/2020
Barbara Westwood Diehl‘s poetry and fiction have appeared in Quiddity, Potomac Review, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, Gargoyle, and other journals. She is founding editor of the Baltimore Review.
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