COVID

2020, year of loss. Missing...

Hugs and kisses, family dinners,

baseball, football, the Olympics.

Quick runs to the grocery, or the mall.

Travel, handshakes, museums, libraries.

Theater, meetings, impromptu dinner parties.

Wine and cheese and cocktail gatherings, 

headlines that don't include 'virus',

doctor's appointments in a room with a doctor.

School and sports and movies in a theater,

meals in a restaurant, drinks at a bar.

walking hand-in-hand, or arm-in-arm,

sharing an ice cream cone, or a bag of popcorn.

Church and singing and coffee hours,

Pats on your shoulder, pecks on the cheek.

Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day.

Graduations, weddings, reunions,

vacations, the beach.

Crowds.

And, in exchange, we get

masks and gloves and wipes and sprays,

less traffic, more walking, and delays

(while surfaces are sanitized).

We know the names and faces

of public health officials, and have forgotten

those of masked neighbors...we know

the daily statistics of infections, deaths,

and positivity rates.

Have seen nasal swabs and ventilators

and the insides of many hospitals that

we didn't want to see,

along with refrigerated truck mortuaries.

People reacting violently to

humane requests to wear a mask.

Editorials and op-eds and 

unfounded speculation on hoaxes

and vaccines and conspiracies

and politicization and finger-pointing,

when all we want

is straight talk, informed talk,

science, if you will,

that knows whereof it speaks:

the what, the why, the how, and

(most important)

when it all will end.

After 9/11

Nineteen years ago. 

Deaths overwhelmed us,

Three thousand dead, ten times more injured.

We listened avidly to the stories:

survivors and heroes and

ordinary people who stood up 

to help in an event

they could barely comprehend.

We stood, stunned,

and watched the towers fall

again and again and again,

hoping it would not be real the next time,

it would all be simply a dream:

the images on the screen,

the memory, the fear,

the gut-wrenching uncertainty

destabilizing all we knew. 

We held on. We prayed.

We survived.

Today we stand, stunned

and overwhelmed.

We are losing sixty times that toll

to other enemies we do not understand.

We are losing the west to wildfires.

We are losing the faith of our youth

who no longer believe we can fix what is 

so terribly wrong.

Protest and violence are our daily bread.

Our people, our land, and our future

are dying, and there aren’t enough heroes

to save us. It’s hard to believe in heroes

any more. We are  beset

by dishonesty, by fear, by corruption.

Belief and trust are gone.

There is nothing and no-one to hold us together.

We are flying apart with each turn of the globe,

and we continue to whirl

out of control:

faster, faster, faster.

O God, slow us down.

Rewind the clock and make us try again.

Return us somehow to the point

where we were our brothers’ keeper;

where we reached out in sympathy, 

not struck out in fear.

Take our disordered values 

and rearrange them into what we

once knew them to be.

Have us look with new eyes

at the world we have broken;

have us look at each other and

give us the will to fix it,   

to move on together

with faith,

with hope,

with love.