Pandemic poetry @skylewriting: pandemic words for tourists visiting a strange country

 

The pandemic has made us all language students.

Each of us, slowly building a Covid Phrasebook, like travellers to a new land.

New words and new phrases are becoming part of the warp and weft of our daily life, taught to us whether we really want to learn them or not. Verbal threads weaving into our smallest chores, into our thoughts and dreams.

It is a new vocabulary to make ourselves understood in this foreign place of vanishing colour and of grey days. Some are words of intensely working science, once complicated that we now have learned to understand; some are in the special alphabet of grief.

Some are the words of tired acceptance, those where we fill our pockets with a new stone every day, feeling how we get heavier and heavier.

And sometimes we even find gold thread – a word that hints at joy, a word when slowly pronounced whispers about a future, a time when where we are all whole again, when the pandemic is a word forgotten like after a school exam from long ago.

Corona glossary

Covid-19

quarantine 

tiers this, tears that

fall and rend and rift and distance

socially

food banks

furloughs

redundancies 

virtual memorials

face masks

hiding the mask

some already wore before.

Refusing to die

I take a walk at night

lifting my head

into the rain

letting tears

patter

on my mask

                       – Daniel Skyle

 

Daniel Skyle

@skylewriting on Instagram

https://www.facebook.com/skylewriting

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