This is so freaking AWESOME!!!! Looking back at the horror of head lice, facing our fears, distancing ourselves from others and their germs and their lice and their whatever. This is epic on so many levels. My sister just phoned to say STAY IN QUARANTINE, this virus (and it seems to me "virus" fits) makes the ordinary flu like a walk in the park - the lungs became cement; the sick cannot lift a head from the pillow, they're s weak and exhausted; the headache makes migraines look like piece of cake. That bad! This is not just a flu, not just a cold, and what it really is, we don't know yet, nor do we know how well anyone recovers. (I had pneumonia while 5-months along with Baby #3, and it took me a year to feel it was truly gone.)
Love the visual as well as the emotional impact here:
we
can
no
longer
see
each other
smile
we
never
touch
Too true!:
Neighbors have become strangers
We one-up each other with fears
We scurry along our ladders of imaginings
Soon we will all teeter at their tops
#LOVE the closing lines too.
And this:
bread will be broken by bare hands dusted with dirt
Just got an email from Mr. McIQ, telling of more shortages to come, and already, not just bread but flour is hard to come by.
Thanks so much for your comment! I am always most nervous about posting my poems, and this one especially. "Who is going to get this?" I wondered. Thank you for getting it.
I've had a $1200 fraudulent charge on my bank account, have gotten the run around from the bank for the last hour, and am now part way through a 50 minute wait for a "specialist". This is BS. Please tell McMensa I think he is a fool. Maybe he and I should get together and tell each other directly how we feel about each other.
Oh man fighting a fraudulent charge is like trying to persuade a tornado to stay home.
Or trying to put out wildfires with a bucket of water. I almost NEVER win battles. Sorry you're fighting this one and wishing you victory!! As for meeting face to face, arguing/debating and using powers of persuasion, I'm even worse at that stuff. Have I ever in my life won an argument, made a convert...? I did get a cancer patient to try mangosteen juice ten years ago, and his wife to this day credits me for his recovery (to some extent) but I'd credit her devotion and nurturing as his wife. The mangosteen juice is just a reinforcement.
I love the teetering at the top of the ladder in your poem, along with that little light at the end of the tunnel that spells hope.
And yes, there is no flour to be had, or yeast. My SIL gleefully told me she had scored a lifetime supply of yeast on Amazon, but had to wait nearly a month for it to arrive! Then she quarantined the package before allowing it into the house. That's why I used that. Few people even know how to use these things! What are they thinking?
I'm of the second side of the virus, as you know, but I am trying very hard to manifest good things coming of all this nonsense. Hence, my wish.