Words Today

There's a new vocabulary for us all:
new sentences and paragraphs,
new compositions of viruses, masks, and ventilators,
of respirators, and shortages, and symptoms,
statistics, infections, outbreaks,
Deaths.
We study essays on isolation (excuse me: "quarantine"
both self and forcibly imposed) and
the new grammar of how many, how much, and
the inevitable how long,
the inevitable where.

(Not here, please, not here.
Not in my neighborhood, not next door,
not my house, not my family.)

But...in stories like this--
these awful stories--
when the worlds we know
are crumbling in our hands,
we are all family;
we are all brothers
inhabiting the same dark spaces
between a harsh reality and even harsher imaginations.
We are holding hands in the dark
(if only in our hearts)
six feet apart, but
closer than before.