Featured Poet Austin Alexis Page 2
To a Pandemic
I miss those beefy yelps
wafting through my window
from the daily nearby judo class.
The view from that same window
at another time of day
offered languid elegance of yoga limbs.
That treat, too, has gone;
I taste the bleakness of the blank studio.
O pandemic, O austere one,
you have spread a glacier,
have rocketed away abundance.
Keep your subway cars with reduced ridership;
their novel cleanliness unnerves me.
Nowadays, department stores display
desert expanses; cinemas’ blanks screens
show a pandemic’s true essence.
These I take as your global lessons.
Except, there’s a chance you hope we’ve learned
no dangers reside in reports
from the noiseless land within.
The hazard is to neglect the splendor of the self
for the heaping brouhaha of news, noise and sights
we knuckleheads have taught ourselves
to mourn and miss.