Millie Gouldthorpe
You came with no feet to walk.
You came with no hands to touch.
You came with no eyes to see,
no ears to hear, no mouth to speak.
Yet you still came; who’s to blame?
And still you come, still you come.
What war games can you play?
With what artillery enter the fray?
Why won’t you go away?
Are you really here to stay, unseen, unheard, unfelt
until you find your prey, your deadly way
silently, easily, quickly into us,
you COVID-19 virus?
How has our beautiful world,
why has this beautiful world come to this?
We know, we know the answer,
simply it’s the cancer,
the cancer we’ve all unleashed upon our world, our beautiful world
and now through you,
at last COVID, our planet is being heard, our planet can heal,
with silence and space,
giving up the race for more,
revealing once more at its core interface.
There is grace,
the grace of green, the grace of clean, the grace of kindness,
overcoming the race of blindness in noticing the dew on the grass,
the flocks of birds as they pass through air that is pure,
fish in the sea swimming free of debris,
forests managing their futures, not razed to the ground for profit and gain,
people of all cultures and creeds being respected,
equality of resources shared according to need,
not pandering to greed, the greeds of the few.
Yes! COVID, it’s you!
COVID through you our world will slowly heal,
will slowly feel it’s beating heart
Alive and well on the road from the hell-bent course it’s been hurtling on ‘til now.
This new race, the race for grace for the human race.
Thank you COVID-19.
Millie Gouldthorpe is a Daylesford resident. This poem is republished from ‘Facemasks and Sanitiser: Pandemic Ponderings from Hepburn Shire‘ with permission.
