She told me to Move In. That people are
hard to hate
close up.
But,
anything closer than six feet,
they say,
isn’t safe
— as if safe were even a possibility…
She told me to hold hands with strangers.
But, strangers are now forbidden.
My eyes reach across the divide,
two abandoned waifs seeking the connection my skin is denied.
It has been 16 days now.
My body is weeping out
Gravity – dry and heavy,
the weight of this isolation draws me
down,
down,
down
I am surrendered
back to the primoradial from which I came.
But here,
they all meet me.
We are back in the raw ingredients where
the distinction between you and I
no longer applies.
This virus is not the enemy.
It is the brazen Bitch calling Bullshit.
It is the Maya Angelou in her unflinching gaze saying
“I see you.”
It is Greta Thunberg speaking without smiling to
soften truth’s impact.
It is Jesus turning over tables,
It is Kali ripping hearts wide open.
It is Life Itself,
threshing
shucking the husks
Grinding us from hard,
to coarse,
to fine.
We have been
too big to travel through the eye of the needle,
too swollen to be useful.
This virus is not the enemy.
The longing of my skin is not the adversary.
It is the calling us home.
When the soft quiet voice cannot be heard
Life will make its stand.
It will roar the raging fires.
From its bowels, it will thrash the tsunami.
And when,
even then
we do not hear,
It sweeps the entire planet with a silence so deafening
We must all
Stop.
Let us not squander this hour of our pain.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2020
About This Poem
Different parts of us hold different feelings about the same thing. I have poems of rage, poems of longing, poems of love and of fear — all of them about my father, all of them true. That is how parts work.
This poem is one part, writing from one moment: day sixteen of isolation, March 2020, when none of us knew anything yet.
For most of us it was hard. Parents who suddenly had all that time with their children wanted their bodies back to themselves. People died — people we knew, people so many of us loved. That loss is real, and no reframe redeems it or explains it away. And those still living with long COVID — a thing that had no name when I wrote this — would struggle to call the virus a gift. I would not ask them to.
This was one part of me, in that one moment, trying to find the flower in the crack in the sidewalk — at a time when other parts of me were collapsing.