The poetry of zoom

Today I took part in two ZOOM meetings with friends from the DEEP underworld. Loads of stuff came up, sad and bad, so I have tried to combine them into a poem. Not a great piece of literature, but some thoughts.

Let us sit on the ground and talk of the deaths of friends

While we knit square huggings for those we miss

And mourn those who find they cannot go on.

We meet by courtesy of some foreign land

We inhabit nowhere we know

We are shadows trying to avoid the darkness

Of closed doors and lost touch

We learn to cook and carve new things

To paint the faces of people we miss

We say hello to Siri

And goodnight to Alexa

Our lives are jigsaws

Put away for these dark days when

We have to construct the light

That illuminates our days

We piece each day together

Tell jokes, play songs

Plant seeds, take our walks

And forget the darkness elsewhere.

Because we are not there.

We cannot be everywhere, just here

Here and now, keeping our balance

Listening, talking, sharing, scaring

Occasionally, for good measure

Our poems cheer us into another round of greetings

Anon and his gentil cock

Wordsworth on London Bridge

Sumer is icumen in

But for now we lie, half awake, half dreaming

Waiting to see if our clock is about to stop

Waiting for the warming sun to rise on us again

Waiting to pass into a new land

The same but profoundly different