A Glimpse of Starlight

I already posted this on Instagram, but I wanted all my Corona poetry in one spot. I originally wrote it in April, I think, but now I realize it also echoes my sentiments about my—our—newfound awareness of the racial injustices in America. We are dealing with hard things, friends. We are tired. But we cannot stop. And let us not waste this time longing for “the good old days.”

The worst tragedy of this:
Some of us will come out unchanged.
Whatever you must do to cope, don’t
Strap a mask over the smile of death.
Don’t sanitize normal life,
Stripping it of the germs of callousness and distraction,
The way we scrolled our days away,
As if we were healthy then.

Death to normal.
Tear the veil that busyness drapes over us
And see where we really stand:
Beneath naked heaven, the weight of eternity bearing down,
The light of a far country coming ever closer
(We ignore it till our feet brush its shoreline––too late).

That terrible smile, that consuming light,
Face them now. Now, before
The grim reaper of perceived normalcy takes us.
Any death but that.