More poetic thoughts for these awful times.....

These are lock-down times for us all, and for most of us they are essentially unprecedented.  We, or at least I, sit at home, gazing out the window wishing for normalcy.  Would you agree with me, that we are in a time to contemplate the meaning of things, the things that really have meaning?  And, in the absence of other ways that seems even nearly suitable, I try to write my thoughts in verse.  Whether anybody else will think that's appropriate, at least here are examples that seem apt to me.


Gravely, gravely

Gravely, gravely came the news

Of viral pestilential blues

Whence deaths and disabilities

Were nearly universal woes

The toll too great to read the roll

The land beset with sighs and cries

The toll, the toll--we scan the rolls

Of names that once were lively souls

The list grew daily as did sighs

For those who’ll ne’er again give smiles

A roll too long to be all told

Oh, land beset with sighs and cries!

Some day, some day, will names be few

Of deaths that pile, by ones and twos

To add to graves from yesterday:

Then, fertilizing fields of grass

Producing flowers and fragrant dews

Graves once beset by sighs and cries

As the Tombstones Wear Away

(From a walk in an old Massachusetts graveyard)

From tombstones in the graveyard, our history wears away;

Weath’ring very slowly, yet eroding day by day:

Of children falling ere they played, inscribed are many named;

They had brief lives, then passed away, so soon, and ne’er were famed.

Of others passing in decline are memories waning, too,

As tombstoned records of their days are slowly eaten through:

Ah! and since our Earth itself’s a slowly aging ball,

The time will come when no one’s memory exists at all.