the murky brew of the virus

distancing and immediacy

the future used to look like the past,

the wheel turns, and, like the seasons, 

our activities of work and recreation

would return and leave with predicability,

all of this, though, with a personal end-date 

we can’t quite figure,

the story goes on, 

and suddenly it’s over for us,

now, the reassurance of repeated experience

into the tomorrows that may be still possible for us

dissolves into the murky brew 

that a virus uses to cloud the clarity 

of what the future will look like,

the reassurance of human contact

reduced to the closest of family,

plans of trips out of country, in country, poof away

as if they were never real anyway,

community challenged by the tenuousness 

of the Internet connection,

and by the new social distancing

that turns us each into personas of little boxes on screens,

hard to read at the best,

many of my students retreat into blank screens

or the whim of an image not their face,

such evasions feel to me like candy,

in that it feels good at the time,

yet I fear it is self-indulgent 

and has no redeeming value,

community, at its best, is first a house of cards

that requires all of us to risk and work to connect and build 

so that the fragility of card upon card

can become as a stone bridge built with the mortar

of each of us taking risks to become more

than fear and self-indulgence call us to be.

by Henry H. Walker

May 15, ‘20