Easter Eve

A little prose piece of whats on my mind.

The signs were everywhere. The paradoxes, plentiful.

The world was in bloom/ Yet hospitals were full

The sky was never more radiant/ As people were sequestered inside

Our hands never more clean/ As fear of a virus made us scrub them within an inch of our lives.

The people communicate now more than ever/ Yet it is born of pressing fear and uncertianty

My pen was never more animated/ Yet the topic was bleak.

Here lay my reminder. I began to really see the frailties of my human condition. The chinks in what I felt until now was infallible armor. Life is so delicate. Spider web level. Yet spun on a brittle branch often besieged by brutal winds, and it weakened my reserve. The constant beat of news and information, well meaning as it was, made me fear and dread any cough, sneeze or seemingly innocuous seasonal symptoms, blowing them out of proportion until my sleep was minimized, and my mind upended by trepidation. I lay in bed with neither phone nor music. Only the white noise of my fan and the delicate trickle of a defuser as my soundtrack. Try as I may, it left me shaken. Like a sturdy picture had come crashing down after years, now I was always watching over my shoulder. My faith in my own body had been rocked.

It seemed that life itself had toppled to the floor, and all had to reassess themselves, as Mother Earth, long ago banished to the sidelines had brazenly seized the rug back. This didn’t discriminate. Mothers and children, Fathers and sons. Lawyers and artisans, painters and garbage workers, waitresses and welders, collars of white and blue, bodies of old and young. All would be affected. All would be up-heaved. All would lay heel to this archaic uncertainty. The stubborn and resistant would be just that. The complicit would shun themselves away until the coast was clear. The indefatigable and willful would try to bargain and negotiate the matter.

But it didnt matter. Like in some modern variation of the Danse Macabre, all of us, of all ranks would clasp hands with this ever stalwart, crimson crown donning chaos lord and go dancing off, willing and unwilling to who knows where. Some to our homes. Some to a hospital bed. Some having no idea yet at all. All the while the skies would shine blue, the larks would sing aloud, the rivers and streams shone crystaline and divine and nature would roam again.

-giving no thought to us at all.

Something to think about, this Easter Eve.