Abstract
Three poems written during the period of “lockdown” in the UK in early 2020. Each poem works in, and responds to, the confluence of the personal, the material, and the socio-political.
Lockdown Birthday
Today, we speak about
her birthday on Monday
when we sang to her
they, outside her window
and I, through the screen
of a phone held
by Elsa, whose name
I know, but have never
seen, heard, met
they stood outside,
Elsa held a phone,
we distance-sang
and, today, she remembers
how, on her birthday
we were there
What Did You Do During the Virus?
What did you do during the virus?
they will ask
like, way back, when they talked about how
“your Uncle Derek, you know, he had a good war”
a thwarted mountaineer climbs Everest
on the stairs of his house
a 99-year-old completes 100
laps of his back garden
a champion cyclist mirrors a nurse’s shift
pedals 12 hours a day over 3 days
my friend paints her house, another teaches his children,
another rises at 5 am to read, another is writing a book
so, years on, here it will be –
worked on handstand, did 8 pull-ups
plucked new bars of an old song
and began to break, make, my life
Breaking Up in a Time of Corona: Scaffolding
The scaffolding outside the kitchen
Was assembled over days, steel pole clamped
to steel pole, ladders strapped and planks laid,
until it reached the roof
five floors up from the road below
Now the virus has scared us all inside
and the scaffold stands abandoned,
without purpose except to filter the dangerous world
outside our home. From within we dismantle
the frame of our life together, undoing it piece by piece
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
