Quarantine

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter Q:

quarantine

awoken

by birdsong

Guess when this was written? I wrote this, along with many other similarly themed poems, just as the coronavirus pandemic started, on 9 April 2020. Everyone’s lives were upended, including daily schedules and routines. Many of us started working from home. Zoom entered our lives. Businesses closed, and we had so many event cancellations and reschedulings! Have a look at my longer poem, “An Abundance of Caution.” No wonder I was woken by birdsong instead of a more usual alarm. Pandemic poems were not necessarily easy to publish, however, because there were suddenly so many of them. In 2020 and 2021 I tried submitting this poem to a pandemic anthology (I forget the title), and to Mayfly, Blithe Spirit, Modern Haiku (twice, the second time by accident), Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Wales Haiku Journal, and Kingfisher. Rather than making submissions feel like a futile effort, these journals were accepting other poems—just not this one. So, my next move was to send this to Geppo, on 21 March 2021, a year into the pandemic, where it was still all-too-relevant and was published in the spring of 2021. I also included this poem in “Shadow of My Pen,” my 2021 trifold. Years from now the abundance of quarantine and pandemic poems from a certain few years may begin to feel quaint. But it was a serious and trying time for everyone, filled with uncertainty and upheaval. But we noticed new things, paid attention to blessings we had too long taken for granted. I enjoyed more neighbourhood walks in a year than in ten years previously. So many painted rocks and lots of sidewalk chalk art in our neighbourhood that we had never seen before! So much to be thankful for . . . including birdsong.

—25 May 2025 (previously unpublished)