Our cocooning becomes oddly normal. We are a household of seven including three grandchildren, two teachers who work online each day, and two “oulwans” who mind children and write an assignment for the Masters.
Along with this, meetings and workshops become virtual. Poems spread across the web, ideas travel from mind to brain to arm to pen to paper and to screen.
To date, 12 million people contracted the virus and 550,000 have died across the world, a world that did not understand what was happening and did not know what to do. It is how pandemics work – fast, deadly, and out of control. It hurts our vulnerable populations and their carers worst of all.
Washing over all of that came Black Lives Matter, the bursting alive of a long history of inequality against our black communities across the world. The tinder for that was the outrageous murder of a black man by a white police officer on camera.
Thoughts like these can send a body to the bottom of the pit quickly. An antidote helps and may even be necessary, some healthy dissociation to get through the day.
Here is something totally disconnected from our current situation. Read, enjoy, pass on, send feedback.
Pleasure
Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning thus
lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life
Victor Frankl
Pavlova topped with strawberries, plums, grapes,
your clear skin under the palm of my hand
Grandchildren’s early morning jump on our bed
Mozart Soave il vento Cosi fan Tutti, Puccini
Addio La Boheme, Verdi Ave Maria Otello
The three-hundred-year-old oak tree that we hug
Mahler’s second symphony in Edinburgh
Shostakovich chamber music in the late evening
Pints with classmates, laughs and poems
Opening night of Twentieth Century Coward Peter
Shaffer’s Equus the college production all those years ago
Summer morning in the garden of a
bunker apartment in France
Peter Clarke
8th July 2020
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