April 2020
by Christopher Bernard
We walk the silent
streets among monuments
dark as tombs of an
ancient time
long forgotten, frozen
in silly
selfies and worries
no one can even
remember now;
older than memory a
time
that ended a mere week
ago,
a month, a day, an
hour ago.
March was only an hour
ago.
March was an eternity
ago.
It is spring and the
flowers are blossoming everywhere.
Silence passes over
the streets
(the sole sound in the
neighborhoods,
the operatic bel canto
of an endless mockingbird)
like the ripples from
a stone that falls
into a neglected pond.
They expand
slowly over the
besieged city
dark and cool at the
bottom of the sky:
over the clumps of
office towers,
the chasmed streets,
the glistening rails,
the darkened restaurants
and bars,
the wordless cafes,
the tidy, disappointed
sidewalks,
the hush of missing
crowds,
the intersections of
empty crosses,
the stillness of the
churches
where the bells ring
above empty naves,
storefronts closed
behind their shields
of plywood painted
gray,
white, black, as if to
say,
“We are at war, our
ships are gray,
our will is black, our
hopes are white,”
until they splash the
hospitals
and there break
with desperation,
grief and fear,
and the stone that is
held against fear,
skill, courage, will,
the hard
love of a determined
yet frightened intent,
arrayed against an
insidious invasion
riding the air like
gossamer,
defending as with ax
and pike
or mangy hides of a
long-dead age
and howls of
execration and rage,
the pierced wall of
the modern town,
what now appalls the
world.
Just yesterday, before
the stone
fell, life, it was so
much simpler . . .
That will be the future’s myth.
Of course it will be a
lie.
Life was never
simpler.
Man against man, and
against woman, was the rule,
commanded by genes,
natural selection,
and our bizarre yet
entirely human mix
of the irrational and the
arrogant.
The world was, as
usual, at war
with its
silver-stained reflection in the glass.
Humankind was proving
a gorgeous catastrophe
for life
on a planet the size
of a pebble
slung from a
slingshot. We were the crown
virus enthroned in the
breath of the world.
And now, in a cruelly
fair reverse,
the crown virus has
laid siege
to human monumentality
and mortified its
pride. The skies
are clear of plane and
smog, the clouds
and birds alone
inhabit it,
the plains have only
farmers cross them,
the mountains do not
burn, the woods
are quiet with the
stuttering of squirrels,
the tangled skein of
interstates
is silent except for
insouciant semis
running drink and food
to the locked down.
The night is black as
ink
strewn with glittering
points
we had almost
forgotten.
The air, transparent
for miles
as glass, stands fresh
as morning.
Greenland freezes a
film of water
back into ice. The
corals
hold their limestone
like a breath
beneath a glassy sea.
The city is filled
with singing
and archipelagoes of
blossoming flowers.
Birds, knowing nothing
but the leaning sun’s
ecliptic
and the burnished
weathering of the wind,
migrate in their
clouds northward,
choiring.
The flowers proclaim
that beauty
will always triumph
everywhere.
“We must love one another or die,” said the poet.
Then changed his mind
to the obvious fact:
“We must love one
another and die.”
But this thought undermined
his poem.
And so he scrubbed the
line, almost
tossed away the poem.
How
we live makes the
change beyond
where we bow out of
the light;
our choices made, our
acts, our words –
these make our meaning
and our truth,
our good, our evil:
the stones dropped in
a pool,
ripples shivering
outward
in growing circles of
effect
into infinity,
the moment into
eternity,
beyond our little
lives more or less forever.
Must we die for the
world to live?
This is the question
with the forced reply.
If we say to that word
“no,”
we are not free from
what we know.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third
collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to
appear later this year.
