From the couch on which I sit
with a pug dog on my lap
beside my window on this wet gray day in Chicago,
to the folks along the highway in their tents, trying to sleep,
to grandmothers in nursing homes, whose hands ache for a hand
To the doctors, nurses, paramedics,
electricians, transit workers, plumbers, pharmacists, firefighters,
farmers, cashiers, ambulance drivers, grocers, cooks, food deliverers,
water systems operators, warehouse workers
To folk in Rome, Beijing, Madrid, Johannesburg, New York,
San Juan, Baghdad, Seoul, London, Rio, Mexico City,
Moscow, Cairo, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Tokyo,
Delhi, São Paulo, L.A., staying home from work
Everywhere we are together
and everywhere alone
Bored, or anxious, talking on Zoom,
washing our hands, watching the news
Every day our deaths are tolled
and stories go untold
Too many lives to weep for
(Who would weep but for their own?)
And yet, which deaths are not for me
to mourn as I would family?
Has not our sense of separateness
been wholly overthrown?
(The evolutionary origins of viruses are unclear
The only fact on which we can agree, they say,
is that they are primordial, ancient as life on earth itself,
integral to the universe, keeping it intact...
And aren't we all as small to God
yet vital to the earth?)
And from each harsh and personal death
affirming the union of our shared breath
is not humanity being born
though it is a painful birth?
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