Coronavirus Is Stealing More Than Our Lives — We Are a Changing People
A free verse, stream-of-consciousness style poem
We are a changing people. Perhaps we’ve always been here, this place of unrest feeling trapped and exploited
but now — while inflammation and Covid creeps into lungs and expels through humans being humans to other humans and blinded by
our need for Walmart.
But we are a changing people. We must be, right? We see the numbers of humans who can’t even bury their humans, the ones they’ve loved with and slept next to
for so many circles around the sun they forget how many— we see them, don’t we?
We hear their wails in hospital halls and outside nursing home doors and in cars and on the freeway going fast, very fast trying to bypass “new normal” and get back
to where the breathing was just breathing and masks didn’t come in various prints and we didn’t have to worry about who touched the pizza or who coughed on the shopping cart and who stayed in and why and please
put down that sign — your bitchy whines about freedom are lost in the cries of the thousands upon thousands of lives lost and the hush of video-funerals too impersonal to honor their loves.
We are a changing people. A devolving people. A hurting, divided, angry people but we
— we can be a hoping people — humans kind to humankind and how precious the breaths of each other not just those of our own color and the ones from whom we can extract a few dollars — we can
and we must reach for the souls of each other appreciate the skins of each other and put on our damn masks for each other
while the days spin into summer, and the numbers spin toward 6 digits and Covid-19 is churning and evolving and stealing and stealing and stealing let us rise up — a people to help,
a people to hear the cries of those who mourn
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Christina M. Ward is a poet who writes on nature subjects and to the deep human story we all share. If you would like to follow her work you can do that here on Medium, follow her publications Politically Speaking and Fiddleheads & Floss Poetry or follow her on social media.
