Virus

Silent with beings we’re meant to follow,
on occasion asking a question, looking up
and about on mattress or mat, footwear shucked off,
are conventions that mean keeping a distance,
not touching, like prayers to those we were asked
to plague when in trouble, which we did
and may still do like many, like me,
when affronted by death.

But if, in time, we’ve come to believe
they are in the mind, those beings,
the wounds they staunch without touching,
the fear, too, of dying in bits of ourselves,
in a litter of unanswered questions,
we may still have in mind what we carried
from them, those beings once believed in,
and which, though at a distance, in momentary
lapses of reason, through hoops of unquenchable fire,
we leaped to and clasped to our hearts.
**
Treasure the corona you’ve made of contagion –
their kisses, their touch, if that’s what you’ve done.
It could be a word – one, just one: ‘forgiveness’,
‘compassion’, the crown we were not meant to wear
alone but pass from person to person.