J. K. DURICK - POEMS

J. K. Durick is a retired writing teacher and online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Literary Yard, Vox Poetica, Synchronized Chaos, Madswirl, Pendemic, and Eskimo Pie.

Plague Poem for Day Twenty

Now I remember the small events, disasters in
their own right, but limited things that lit up
my childhood neighborhood, the fiery crashes
at the Pearl Street corner, or the big one,
the nearby garage burning, lighting up the night,
exploding, taking out the back of its house.
These were communal events, we’d dress
the best we could – they usually got us out
in the middle of the night – waking to a bad
dream to share; we’d greet our neighbors
and stand together, back a bit, to watch what
was happening in our limited place, a world
that was ours to be in and watch -- things like
wars and starvation, riots and assassinations,
and, of course, epidemics and these shortages
happened outside our circle, happened to others,
and were easy to define that way, outside to others.
And these were the usual shoulder to shoulder
committee-like meetings on common concerns,
we’d talk the details through, comparing this to
familiar things – there were no distances between
us then, we shared cigarettes, borrowed jackets,
shook hands, held hands, hugged if cold, and then
tired kids turned to playing, elders grouped together
their limited wisdom, but eventually we would tire
of it and wander home knowing we had stories worth
telling the next day, the next day, the quiet way
these things would always end.

Plague Poem for Day Twenty-Two

Rachel Carson had it that Spring
would come and we’d step out
into a world of silence, silence
brought on by our meddling with
nature, manipulating it to our ends
and there we would be with only
sounds of our own making, cars
going by, planes overhead, perhaps
some music from the radio if we
bothered with it beyond our talk
of the who and why of the silent
world, but something’s happened
on our way toward Carson’s silent
place, we’ve come to a new silence.
This morning, for instance, we step
out into a chorus of birds greeting
this early Spring day, the sun, food,
the bounty of it all, it’s their world
free of car and plane noise, and all
the clutter of human sounds, now
people go by, faces covered, quiet
for once, perhaps listening, with very
little to say, knowing full well that
we made it this way.

​Plague Poem Twenty-Three

Church services are on YouTube,
our books download, our sons
text their concerns, our isolation,
our exposure to something we/they
can’t see or understand,
 
the internet offers an update by
state with a map, a symptom list,
and something they choose to call
“stimulus package details,”
 
but we still wave to the neighbors
then they cautiously wave back
knowing that statistics have us,
the oldest on the street, first
to go and if it gets us first then
might/will come for them, and
 
for now, we know that this is
our life in the time of covid-19
and perhaps the best we can do.



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Plague Poem for Day Twenty-Four

I could begin with something cynical,
say that the day seems stale already,
smells like yesterday’s leftovers, or sounds
like listening to my parents’ best man,
years later, about his life since then,
sleep inducing, droning on and on, or
I could say it feels like full body tennis
elbow, an ache in all that’s left of my teeth,
or tastes like all that can go wrong to food
left out too long; I could begin with a litany
of the woes that stay with us, our isolation,
distancing, the list of the dying and dead,
numbers given by state as if we were in
a game of losers and losers, of shortages,
doctors and nurses pleading for supplies,
of news conferences that get good ratings
but tell us nothing worth hearing. I could
begin with something cynical and continue
to fill the page, but that seems way too easy.

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Plague Poem for Day Thirty-One

New York has become a sad place,
a ghost town we go to every day,
a quick in and out by camera and
a comment. First, they were in line
waiting for emergency rooms to
have enough room for them and
the misery their presence implied,
then full hospitals and new builds
for beds to fill/filled with their sick
and dying, and now portable morgues
and mass grave sites. It’s a ghost town
with empty streets and a few masked
extras desperately gathering necessities
in a place that once represented plenty
and extravagance, street fairs and long
lines waiting to enjoy the moment,
lined up to be entertained, sung to,
danced for, brought into the secret of
living life to the fullest or as full as
they could make it. New York City has
become a sad place, a ghost town,
an empty movie set telling us a story,
a story we all are getting to know too well.


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 Plague Poem for Day Thirty-Two

Let’s find something to celebrate about today,
something that sets it off from the other days
we have spent like this, yesterday, the days before
that. Let’s step back from this routine, what is it:
getting up, washing, dressing, taking the right pills
in their prescribed order, eating, reading, you your
romances, me my action thrillers, spies and serial
killers as if we need these alternate lives to hold us
together and keep us going. Let’s find something,
anything to set this day off from days we have lived
already. Let’s pretend it’s a birthday for one of us,
or our anniversary, a wedding day for one of our boys,
even a funeral to go to would get us moving out of
this quiet well-made play we’ve made of our day,
this tired storyline we have come to be, this tale told
idiot signifying that we can’t come up with something
anything to set one day off from another, something
to celebrate today, this far into their quarantine.


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