You wondered in “Love”,
“Will we ever live so
Intensely again?”
The rhetorical question
Pregnant with sadness and loss,
So relevant to this pandemic time.
Where we are kept alive but
Not authorised to be alive.
Only Nature erupts with fervour
Any more.
A thrush on a wire sings
Fiercely aloft the blanket
Of silence cocooning the Earth.
We praise your ability to find
Subject matter in the quiet
Stillness of suburbia.
A traveller’s horse,
A newspaper photograph,
A mother calling her child in
For bed, a family heirloom,
A visit to the hospital,
A Famine road, a teenage daughter,
A blackbird opening wings,
Stars in the sky.
Now we search for subject matter
In the quiet stillness of Covid-19.
……….
Padraig McLoughlin is a retired secondary school teacher of English and History from Westport Co. Mayo. His work has been published in the former Irish Press, The Mayo News, Achill Link and The Connaught Telegraph. Currently, he is working on his first novel.