In the first six months of the pandemic, I thought often about characterizations of world history, world events, and how poets make accounts during crises. The philosopher Hegel was often in mind, his idea of the world soul. I was also rereading the book of Revelation and thinking about racialized violence at the root of our history. The perceptions of things floating across the various screens and landscapes were often markers. This poem is part of a sequence of 24 poems I worked on to weave a sense of dailiness and eternity, solitude and community.•
Curled thrush song staggering over moral tally
Number is all wrote Baudelaire
Fox kits hunting solitary voles
So many beings here without despair
From a box of words called a room
We heard a protest in the distances
The pall caul crawl through summer
Struggling bees not yet out of work
Cities were running out of sidewalks
Where men could sleep
Human life on the high fade
Didn’t see plovers but saw yellow police tape
Didn’t see whales chasing dots of krill
Some might make it north
Captain Ahab chasing minnows now
Compared to what
is this our earthly fear
Roadside mosses seasonally moist rocks
Unfailing dirt arriving from a star
Straight from its lifelike origins ear
Love keep love at the crossroads
Of doing nothing & nothing doing
Before the next ignorant machine opens
Briefly & always to another life
