Christopher Woods, Red to Green
Plague Years
Emma Johnson-Rivard
History will mark this place, all eyes on the tombs,
We sweep the dust now, our ghosts unnamed,
but I remember the paintings, too. It wasn’t all horror,
though there were bad dreams, of course. But there was
art begun in the days before quarantine. It took murals,
note cards, fabric stitched clean. You remember? Someone
ought to. We learned new paths, rewrote ourselves among
the dead we forgot. Ten years from now this will all seem
clearer, a picture framed and mounted, given prominence.
Not of the dead stacked in trucks or the mother who died
alone, her daughter caught behind a screen, of hospitals
and glass burned clean, but after–a haze, a changing
tide of us among our forgotten, all-American ghosts.
We have no martyrs here, only billionaire sons and
the hopeful masses killing themselves for a dream. Is this
what we’ve come to? We, royal, forgetting the paintings,
the stitchwork it took to survive. It took prominence
even to bury our dead. All these seems fantastical now,
mythology through the trees of us. What did we learn?
Maybe there was no lesson. Maybe this is just a point
in time, a marker among somebody else’s pages, tragedy
or just time spent, forgotten, then remembered again. I
survived, became stranger than myself. I wrote myself
into pages, diary-strong, and attended no funerals. One day
this will make sense, I’m told. One day you will understand
yourself, the liars say, trying to comfort each other. It happened
but not like that. We didn’t come together but we knotted our
stitches, tore the fabric into new shapes. This is the world now,
the new dawn shining red. I am still here.
Emma Johnson-Rivard
History will mark this place, all eyes on the tombs,
We sweep the dust now, our ghosts unnamed,
but I remember the paintings, too. It wasn’t all horror,
though there were bad dreams, of course. But there was
art begun in the days before quarantine. It took murals,
note cards, fabric stitched clean. You remember? Someone
ought to. We learned new paths, rewrote ourselves among
the dead we forgot. Ten years from now this will all seem
clearer, a picture framed and mounted, given prominence.
Not of the dead stacked in trucks or the mother who died
alone, her daughter caught behind a screen, of hospitals
and glass burned clean, but after–a haze, a changing
tide of us among our forgotten, all-American ghosts.
We have no martyrs here, only billionaire sons and
the hopeful masses killing themselves for a dream. Is this
what we’ve come to? We, royal, forgetting the paintings,
the stitchwork it took to survive. It took prominence
even to bury our dead. All these seems fantastical now,
mythology through the trees of us. What did we learn?
Maybe there was no lesson. Maybe this is just a point
in time, a marker among somebody else’s pages, tragedy
or just time spent, forgotten, then remembered again. I
survived, became stranger than myself. I wrote myself
into pages, diary-strong, and attended no funerals. One day
this will make sense, I’m told. One day you will understand
yourself, the liars say, trying to comfort each other. It happened
but not like that. We didn’t come together but we knotted our
stitches, tore the fabric into new shapes. This is the world now,
the new dawn shining red. I am still here.