History
By: Elaine Smith Dunlap
About The Poem
The experience of isolation inspired this poem as the only activity I felt able to pursue was walking in the park and often with one or another of my friends.
The Poem
Time,
Being motion through space,
Most of our
Movements
Through the spaces
Of our lives
Are relatively insignificant.
But sometimes
We slip into history
With a substantial jolt:
Where you were,
When Kennedy died,
Or Princess Diana,
What you saw
In San Francisco,
When the Earth quaked,
Or witnessed
Of the crumbling towers.
So now this:
The making very near
And small
Of our activities.
We’re plagued by fear
Of other people:
Joggers spraying sweat and germs,
Youthful arrogance,
Jostlers in a queue,
Or grabbers for the Standard news
Impatiently too close
And sneering at the old.
But being here
In these extraordinary times
When the kaleidoscope of culture
Myriad and various
Delights of taste and sound and sight
-LONDON –
Silenced
To everything
But walks along the river
Through the blooming park,
And friends,
Crucially And Friends.
How we stayed together
Moving through these times,
A chain of isolated links.
Even Homer might have said of us
Things of song
For men of the future!
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