During the Covid Year

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

--Kurt  Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

clocks and calendars were meaningless.  One hour
became another without appointments or assignations,
one day became another without family coming
for Sunday dinner or papers to be handed back Friday.
An hour was a book, or a nap, or a zoom with people
across the country where for some it was 8:00 am,
for others 11:00. Some ate breakfast, others considered
lunch.  A day might start at noon.  Darkness never left.
There was nothing to save time for.  No place to go.

No one to meet.  No time like the present.  All time
was present.  Now, we thought, might be forever,
with no forever in the future.  On a sliding scale, where
was early?  Where was late?  Autumn was a decade long,
Christmas only a day.  Light streaking the sky, thin gold
threads, the fluff of blood red, the blue below.
Is it fading?  Is it sunrise, or sunset?  Someday,
we all said, having no idea what that meant.  

7/28/21

Anita Skeen is professor emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, where she is series editor for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Competition.  She is the author of six volumes of poetry.

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