Diverting dactyls for difficult days

Reflections from a home front: 14
It feels like it’s been a tough week. Nearly everyone I spoke to seemed to have run into a slough of despond.

Locking down was relatively easy: clear the desk, take your belongings, get out, quick as you can. Returning to the world, a very different world, looks much, much harder. And it’s still a return in the teeth of lockdown.  And now we’re really feeling the edge of those teeth.  Even if we began with can-do confidence, quarantine fatigue is quite evidently setting in. As is language fatigue, with words like unprecedented on overtime. In the words of Chekov, “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.” 

Right, I thought. This week, I’ll write something that’s simply fun and diverting. I even adopted a galloping dactyllic metre in an effort to keep things upbeat. [1] But poems have a way of writing themselves, and, well, things didn’t go quite according to plan. But it’s not without its lighter moments. As ever, you can click to hear it or scroll down to read.

       Unprecedented
​        Work was never this homely.
       And home never worked to such cost.
       With virtual school
       And summits on Zoom
       And sing-ins and workouts
       All jammed in one room,
       Our boundaries were never so crossed.

       Our larders were never so laden.
       (Shelves in Waitrose were never so bare.)
       Our loaves are so various!
       (Though our sourdough’s precarious.)
       It’s like the Great Bake Off
       Though not so vicarious – 
       We’ve all got a cake to compère.

       Our street was never this silent.
       The silence was never so loud.
       The larks and the warblers
       Are thronging the borders,
       The lawn has been trashed
       By some feathered marauders,
       And ospreys patrol round the pond.

       Our dreams were never so real.
       Reality never this tough.
       Life leaves us reeling
       And there’s no concealing
       That words can’t convey 
       The freight of our feeling
       And never is never enough.

       The screen stares back. It is empty.
       The speakers are mute. Not a sound.
       But a note or a glide
       Like a cell deep inside,
       Like the song of the outermost 
       Star as it died,
       Will ever forever surround
       Till ever in never is found.

Patrolling osprey

1. Dactyllic metre –  dum-di-di, dum-di-di. In contrast to the more usual, iambic – di-dum, di-dum.

read the introduction to the reflections here