My First and Second Covid 19 Poems. Two Poems by Edward Denniston

My First Covid 19 Poem March 20th, 2020

Sitting across from me
this Spring equinox
in your little front room
neat the way you want it
neat, where this evening
with a playful formality
we’ve agreed to meet
and you lay your novel down
to ask, ‘and where are you now?’

I’m on my way by bicycle
is where I am
cycling at a leisurely pace
from Letterkeen Wood
on the forest track north eastward
in a damp cloth of mist
that’ll be thinning out somewhere
over the Plains of Mayo.
I’ll go down to Lake Bunaveela.
Stop and walk into the heart
of a shaky raised bog
down a laneway at Keenagh –
all the time listening, looking out,
all the time discarding a thought.
Eventually I’ll arrive
at Rakestreet –
a beguiling name
for a destination.
Rakestreet.
That’s where I’ll stop.
This is where I am now
drinking a pint of stout
happy as a grig outside
where I sense the sun will seep through soon –
thinking about Humbert’s men,
marching under Nephin,
heading for the Midlands.

That’s where you were yesterday evening you say,
at Rakestreet. Yes, can’t you hear the exotic? Rakestreet .
After all this is over, I promise, I’ll bring you that road.

My 2nd Covid 19 Poem April 4th, 2020

Almost 2000 flimsy pages, dense text,
soft back – it flops onto my desk,
Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s
biblical tome about the whole shebang
of organisms, living.
I feel ceremony as I turn

to 20 pages of chapter and verse:
the virus. Measured by nanometer,
one thousand millionth of a metre.
Millions gather on a pinhead.
‘Let’s examine the structure’

say Campbell, Reece and Mitchell.
One of them has drawn a simple diagram –
how the caspid memes its way.
But, to reassure you, I find nothing.
Nothing to illustrate how love works.
Nothing to add to a stammering prayer.

…………………………..

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