The Virus Casts a Lurid Glow

 

The number of COVID cases continues to grow in the USA.  The large convent where I live is now on lockdown again, due to a nurse who tested positive.  How long this lockdown will last, I do not know,

Anyway, we are all wearing masks.  In honor of that,

Here is a poem by Rachel Hadas:

 

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

for Bryanna Tidmarsh

 

Do you believe in ghosts? she asked.

New world of specters, muffled, masked:

now is the moment for this query,

when every encounter’s eerie

and we can only recognize

familiar faces by their eyes.

Not quite certain who we see

and navigating cautiously,

we make our slow and blurry way

through the labyrinth of each day.

If human faces are concealed

by mask or shield or mask and shield,

much else now is crystal clear –

not that it wasn’t always here,

but habit blithely papered over

structures we now must rediscover.

The virus casts a lurid glow

on what we knew and didn’t know,

leaving us with no excuse

to ignore forces on the loose.

In streets now crowded, we can sense

history’s weighty consequence,

not dead, and therefore not a ghost –

the past is never even past.

Still, I believe in ghosts: in all

the clouds of the invisible

that  now beset us: memory,

injustice, virus, ancestry,

the gifts and poisons of each spirit

that we unknowingly inherit,

the countless energies that fly

unnoticed by the human eye.

So much, so much we cannot see!

That is what ghost means to me.

Pandora opened up her jar;

out flew the evils, fast and far,

famine and pestilence and war.

Hope, last, remained inside somehow –

hope that sustains us here and now,

poised, out most beloved ghost,

between the future and the past.

I got my mask in honor of the Day of the Dead