Politics and pandemic pried open the cellar door to our country and much of the world in 2020. Many of us were surprised at what we found, and many of us weren’t. This is one of my meditations on those early days when we didn’t know what to expect.
by Joe Engel
All I hear are sirens
and the American flag
flapping on top of the hospital.
It whips and dances in a spotlight
to upstage the black sky
above us as I sit on my porch.
When I was a kid
I choked up
at the national anthem
but now, it seems, love of country
is a towel snapped by a bully
in the locker room,
that’s what I hear in the wind.
Tonight belongs to Covid 19
empty streets
neighbors knocked into bed early
calling more attention
to warm feet, strawberry ice cream,
little sips from a snifter of whiskey-
but mostly, for me,
tonight belongs
to a friend who video calls,
who fell off the wagon
who wants my company.
I’ll open a beer
since this is hard for him to admit.
I don’t know what that makes me.
We are both men who have
reassembled again and again.
In this beer I can taste
the mystery, the magic that each
brown bottle once brought,
a freedom.
I won’t blame him.
I look north and south.
I could use the quiet street as a
bowling lane. Where is the woman
who leaves notes on my car?
Which way are the pins?
Who behind these black windows
turns in their bed, abandoned
by the one who snores beside them?
Stuck on that image
that makes them clench their teeth?
Sometimes our thoughts
are like drawing a number.
Our actions as well.
My friend has been to prison.
He tells me some prisoners
grow stronger in their cells,
in the yard, in the weight room.
There he learned to like poetry.
The wind is stronger than anything
and when I hear those sirens I think
someone has broken from reality
amid this pandemic,
or because of it.
A woman who can’t recognize
that she is not Joan of Arc,
and cops who can’t recognize
her good intent.
It’s like that, if it happens to you,
a differential in wavelengths
dissociation in bloom,
after all, the moon symbolizes night
but there it is in the sky at noon.
Justice, we think,
will only chase the other,
never us for the wrong we do.
What of guilt?
My friend let it crawl
into his lap, shed its fur all over him,
offered a hand when it growled.
Many mean people
raise the American flag.
Our conversation has ended
and I haven’t even looked up
for the moon, but there is something
in the trees,
a bird singing at midnight
there is something in these houses,
something in the paused
thoughts of patients sedated
in the hospital
something that hasn’t been decided yet.
Buds are just sprouting,
tenderly on the twigs
that hold the bird
trilling like a glass flute;
this one is a maverick, calling out
it’s sleeplessness, then
again, getting no response.