Finsbury Park Covidarium
By: Lynn-Marie Harper
About The Poem
This was my first Covid time poem and I submit it because they became increasingly rant like, perhaps this one is not the best but it’s gentle, perhaps the only one that is, because as the death figures ratcheted up. So my anger and feelings came out in poetry, which is both expression and communication.
The Poem
Bright warm sun
spacious meanderings between bodies
the Canada geese and another species
fly into the closed running track
In pairs heeding their own proximity
Whilst the humans adhere to instruction
or follow their own dictates
It is good to be out of the dust bowl
of the flat the builders left only a week ago.
Imagine, I made them tea and we laughed together.
The room is now clean and bright and upside down.
My daughter says “you’ll have weeks, months, to sort it out”
Silence and Radio 4 reigns now
the window is bright, all the books in boxes still,
my resolution to leave on the front wall
all that I did not reshelve undone
I did two Chi Gung sequences in the car park
the film set folk have left vacant.
The basketball court full with lithe young men
In a weeks-time that will be at an end
No planes across my balcony
No children screeching from the nursery.
Facetime has replaced face to face
And daughter braved her ending self-isolation
on Sunday to leave an orchid and echinacea on my doorstep
Beauty and protection,
We spoke across metric lines measured in air.
This Monday more alike a Sunday
in London than I’ve ever known
My hairdresser still open but I cannot breach the threshold
I squint into the sun through a too-long fringe, glad not to be in bed
At ‘elderly hour’ a Tesco worker gifts me
A French loaf he bought a few of for lunches
He’s just delivered rolls but had sent me to an empty shelf
The retail heroes go beyond their duties
They also serve who give away their bread.
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