In this episode I share two 'poems for a pandemic' I've recently written, and I chat to my friend Marissa who also wrote one after I asked my poet friends to join me in writing these.
Below are the words to Marissa's poem:
The Hopeful Calm, Marissa Niven
~~~
Surreal.
Definition:
Having the qualities of surrealism
Example:
To live through a time you know history will look back on,
Whilst doing nothing noteworthy
And yet in doing so
Making history
This situation is surreal to me
You got people too scared to go into the streets,
While neighbours ignore fears and say cheers to breaking the rules,
You'll find no social distancing here
Shopping aisles turned to fight clubs,
City streets to forgotten histories,
Pharmacies look like crime scenes, taped up cause the visual makes it impossible to ignore the new boundaries
Maybe that's why there's a reminder on every screen...
News headlines never change,
Just the numbers do,
And it's easy to forget that each number is a name, and each name is a person, and each person is a story-
...a story with an unsatisfying end...
And still we have leaders who manage to pretend that things aren't so bad
And I wonder
Do they see the same news we do?
Do they see their people dropping in the streets?
Hear the pleas of their doctors to help them?
Or do they only care about who can buy the best publicity and make profit from tragedy?
And as is the way with Tragedy,
She brought her brother Rage
Angrily he searches for someone to blame for his sister's grief
But blame is a funny thing
For rage leads to blame, and blame leads to rage, and all too soon tragedy is born again anew,
And I fear for the people who those grieving will blame
A 2 year old stabbed in a parking lot can attest to that
Drowning in the pains of the world,
And the ignorance
And the grief
It's easy to believe that hope she has left us...
But ask Pandora what remained...
When the box is opened,
And the evils have been unleashed
Hope still stays.
A quiet but steady light to fight the fright of perpetual night
And in this way
We look past the noise of the world in panic
And find the hopeful calm
We find it in the music played from balconies in cities,
Closed down but never forgotten,
In wild eyes of nature as she sends her children to reclaim what we have borrowed,
In the sky's, clear for the first time in how many years,
In the smiles of children, reminders of innocence still safe from all of this
And with our quiet hopeful calm,
We wait for this to pass
For while this fear may be loud
It is hope who's music lasts.
