Another Day, Another Walk In The Woods

The little runes 
trip over,  listless
calendars flip: a zero 
sloughs its skin, shrinks 
to a 1 –– Hey presto, nothing
new has begun. 

But I wouldn't have it otherwise. 

Which is a way of acknowledging that most I have to say about last year has already been said. It's dead, croaked, snuffed, even if its restless ghoul pursues us to what hopefully glimmers at the end of the last of these repetitive tunnels. We were brushed by its furious wingbeats (i.e. my wife was) but came through relatively unharmed. My son and I were tested twice and both times negative, double-nothin, like the zeros in this strange year, a result which itself was as strange as anything else.

I keep a mask round my neck when I walk these narrow farm roads, popular with many other dog-walkers, large family groups and joggers, so that I can simply pull it over my face when a clutch of people approach. I have yet to meet anyone else who bothers wearing  mask in the open air, which I think is (again) strange. On the topic of strangeness, oddness and weirdness, one of the strangest things about this past year, (apart from the barking mad idiocy of down-the-rabbit-hole conspiracies, the Trump cult, weaponised Empire-nostalgia, etc.) has been the proliferation of selective blind spots among people who should know better. They go so far, then, thinking they've done their bit, chill, relax, let the stays out, have a couple of drinks with the mates, forego masks when doing healthy stuff like taking a stroll, drop in for a chat with extended family, and so on. Ah well, enough of that. 

In Poetry Ireland Review 131 Vona Groarke set down some interesting thoughts about how a poet might, or might not, respond to the pandemic: "I think for now and for myself, the best response is awed silence. I won't be rushing into My Coronavirus Poem." Or: "Look one way into the pandemic, it's birdsong and banana bread; look the other, it's lost jobs and loved ones dying; those pokey, diminished funerals; the trauma of all that."  

She is sceptical about poetry offering anything like an adequate response. So am I, though respond I did, perhaps too often. Silence would have been more eloquent. Here are two of those efforts, the first a direct attempt to get something of my horrified fascination at the rapacity of the virus, the second far more oblique, and perhaps better for that: 

NEAR EARTH OBJECTS
 
Someone coughs
and a shower of space rocks
hurtles past, wrapped in
a silence so intense
 
I want to take this lens
to isolate one of them:
pin-cushioned with detonators,
potent as an egg cell
mobbed by sperm;
 
a safe-cracker at home
in the dark, driven by
a single, penetrating will,
a new world
come to explore us.



UNTITLED
–– after a painting by Qin Tianzhu
 
The ink-blot bird –– composed
of a few dark
feathery strokes ––
 
seems so slight
that if it flitted off
it would not leave one
 
splayed, spidery print
on the white
page, the snow,
 
let alone lift
a corner of this
blankness to which
 
it is directly opposed.

   
(Happy New Weird everyone.)