Pandemic poetry @skylewriting: Still, life

 

One thing that the pandemic has done is to help us understand how precious life is.

Death: we are losing people on a daily basis. They are vanishing, leaving, stepping off, while we are still here.

I find myself looking more at people´s faces. The life there, the amazing tiny mimicry that moves smiles and frowns and laughter lines.

How they move, how they breathe, the folds of their clothes.

Sometimes in sadness, sometimes in anger, sometimes seeing frown lines set, and still, they´re alive. So am I, for the moment. We are still sharing the stage of this time and this place, still stumbling through our lines, still wondering what our part is in all this – are we the hero in this play? Is it that person over there? Are we just a supporting actor, are we getting some really good lines this time? (I´ve forgotten my lines! I´ve forgotten my lines!!).

I wrote the poem below during a train journey I had to do. I sat there, just mesmerized by this woman in front of me. Both of us alive on this edge of life and death.

Both of us still here, still breathing, when so many are not.

Still, life

  

Your cheek a bird´s wing;

me on an essential work trip

you heading somewhere

in the seat

in front of me

your window reflection

shifts between old masters;

your small nervous fidgets

with your hair, with your furtive

compact

make you more beautiful to me

a priceless still life

finding ever more beauty

through the small movements of humanity.

We live in a pandemic

the death around us

makes that triangle

of your elbow

those folds of your red sweater

seem even more

amazing, more precious still;

the sketch changes,

you fret, bite a fingernail

rest your cheek in your

palm, close your eyes

as we travel deeper,

into history.

                   – Daniel Skyle

Daniel Skyle

@skylewriting on Instagram

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