Plague Poem for Day Eighty
J. K. Durick
It’s as if they are conspiring against us–
moving a few pieces, changing the wording
just enough, remembering and forgetting
selectively—a sleight of hand, a juggling of
circumstances and here we are, bouncing
down this road, one day almost carefree
and the next up to our necks in all of this.
No one claimed that a pandemic would be
good for us or serve a purpose, nor did they
say that police brutality was a good idea,
especially now, with all our phones recording
us, our TVs reporting on us. No one claimed
and yet here we are in rooms full of rioting,
in evenings given over to rehashing disease
counts and death counts as if we’re playing
a new board game, like updated Monopoly.
I’ll buy this virus hotspot and sell you full
ownership of a street on fire with lines of
police facing lines of demonstrators, lines
that will morph any minute into rioting on
both sides. We will roll the dice, try to fill
in the blanks, draw pictures and then try to
guess what it was that got us here—they
must be conspiring against us, they must be,
we couldn’t have agreed to this.
J. K. Durick
It’s as if they are conspiring against us–
moving a few pieces, changing the wording
just enough, remembering and forgetting
selectively—a sleight of hand, a juggling of
circumstances and here we are, bouncing
down this road, one day almost carefree
and the next up to our necks in all of this.
No one claimed that a pandemic would be
good for us or serve a purpose, nor did they
say that police brutality was a good idea,
especially now, with all our phones recording
us, our TVs reporting on us. No one claimed
and yet here we are in rooms full of rioting,
in evenings given over to rehashing disease
counts and death counts as if we’re playing
a new board game, like updated Monopoly.
I’ll buy this virus hotspot and sell you full
ownership of a street on fire with lines of
police facing lines of demonstrators, lines
that will morph any minute into rioting on
both sides. We will roll the dice, try to fill
in the blanks, draw pictures and then try to
guess what it was that got us here—they
must be conspiring against us, they must be,
we couldn’t have agreed to this.
Photo by B. P. Miller