The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the trajectory of daily life in many ways, large and small. Sheltering in place, flattening the curve, and social distancing are all new additions to our lexicon. While this global event has touched everyone on the planet, people have reacted in different ways. Some of us wear masks everywhere. Some hoard toilet paper. Some cheer healthcare workers at shift changes. Some order groceries for delivery. Some master platforms like Zoom while others keep shooting videos of their nostrils. Some binge-watch Netflix or finally break down and subscribe to Disney+ (guilty). Some track the news obsessively while others unplug.
Me? I started writing haiku on Twitter, which I eventually posted using the hashtags #coronaverse and #PandemicPoetry.
Why haiku? I’m a high school English teacher, and April was National Poetry Month, and while usually I bellow poetry at high school assemblies–or, even better, get the student body to bellow poetry–that wasn’t in the cards in 2020. Plus I was taking my dog on two daily walks and on those walks I stopped looking at my phone and started observing the world around me and thinking. And haiku are short and easily digestible, and the traditional compact form demands brevity and conciseness.
So here are my attempts at #coronaverse, from March 26 to May 19, 2020. You’re welcome. 🙂
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways as I
Wash my hands once more
Has anyone tried
Unplugging 2020?
We’d like a re-do.
“I’d like to kiss you,”
he says. She replies, “That is
not allowed on Zoom.”
Virtual cocktails:
drinking alone together,
laughing remotely.
Georgia’s Gov’ner Kemp:
asymptomatics spread it?
“I had no idea.”
In corona time:
power washing everything.
That’ll do it. Right?
Neighbors are strangers
no more; now we wave and smile,
kindness our vaccine.
Hunkered down at home,
we feel Spring stretch her green limbs,
the buds opening.
My students mourn, robbed
of their spring; still they thank me
with their heartbreak smiles.
“Amazon”—good name:
a river of packages
is flooding my home.
Eight in the evening:
darkness softly falls outside;
inside, we have light.
Jedi Master Luke
living on that rock—THAT was
social distancing.
Needs reminders to
wear pants when getting the mail:
that’s America.
Irony: we must
close down the world while, outside,
Nature opens up.
My wife cuts my hair
in our driveway, shorn locks stirred
like leaves in the breeze.
In a pandemic,
students still wrestle their thoughts
into lines of verse.
#NationalPoetryMonth
Apparently we
have the freedom to be as
selfish as we want.
We’re babysitters,
waiting for parents to say
we can all go home.
Scared of the virus
but saved by soap and water:
It’s the little things.
Sleep is elusive,
a pot of gold at the end
of a dark rainbow.
Do I read that book
or write my book? That is the
writer’s conundrum.
Health in ‘rona time:
working very hard not to
eat my weight in snacks.
If only we could
open hearts as easily
as we open states.
States are like windows—
you don’t throw them open when
it’s storming outside.
All our restaurants
are a bad love story: wide
open but empty.
I miss my students,
who are more than faces and
voices on a screen.
Money is like wind:
blowing in, then vanishing.
People are your rock.
My dog takes me on
a walk, a ten-pound mass of
hair and joy and will.
Fixing a story
is like hanging a picture:
one nudge and it’s true.
Shopping for masks like
fitting glass slippers on feet
to find my true love.
The great irony:
the most gorgeous spring I’ve seen
in corona-time.
Normal is a bird
flying south for the winter,
its return unknown.
Want normal back?
Well, normal is as normal does.
Think Tom Hanks said that.
