Radio Lockdown and Song of the Tortoise when the World Starts Moving. Two poems by Anita Greg

Radio Lockdown

Someone from deep in the Badlands
Began posting …

… monologues – each day we dreamed
That we had an Interior Life
even fictional characters pondering Where are we now?
And Where are we going ? And What does it Mean?

The days of discussion were over
The technically savvy made podcasts
Some blogged – the rest of us
Talked to ourselves and our plants
And our cats and our kitchens – make bread and took photos
In close-up of woodlice and ants
We did PE with wassisname – nine in the morning
For three days at least then imagined we did
For months while we pottered, got fatter
And calm

All the things that we thought we’d do
Given the time
Well – we didn’t do those
Just imagined a sea and an island
Some tunes and a book that we chose

Song of the Tortoise when the World Starts Moving

… one scaly foreleg ventures out
and one reptilian eyelid slowly
opens and a horny beak
goes right – goes left and then goes back into the shell

… busy is left to the bees
along with fear of missing out
and everything avoidable goes flapping past
it’s roof and things are starting happening – but it
has come to love the quiet days

… and it is chewing on a clover leaf
and given over running round
or leaping – any rabbitish pursuits.
It scrabbles in the plantains roots
and then does nothing on the ground.