I too miss it,
The feeling of laughter
Welling-up on a walk
To campus,
Peering across
The grassy quad
To wonder about those
Faces of students
Hidden by hoodies,
Figures bent to phone-
Screens missing out
On the morning
Pouring down on them,
Upright commas
In the rain.
I too yearn
For afternoon coffee
At my favorite café,
Notebook open
To possibility,
Alone with the white
Open spaces,
College-lined, poems
Coming down from heights,
Welling-up from depths,
Like breath and heart
Pumping the elliptical
In the long-ago
Community gym.
I haven’t laughed
Out loud in the rain
Or smiled with my eyes
For two weeks of quarantine,
Let alone write a poem
To lift and excite, a poem
Not a rant of despair,
But here, on the screen
Where I should be working,
Teaching those upright commas
To bend with the world
In its plagues and quakes,
I bend myself to keys
And reply to the gods
And the muse, and you.
Star Coulbrooke, 03/26/2020
Drafted on home office PC in response to Terysa’s poem for Poetry at Three Online contribution 3/25/20, “Today in a World without COVID-19.”
Star Coulbrooke is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, coordinator of the Helicon west community reading series. She is author of three poetry collections, Thin Spines of Memory (2017), Both Sides from the Middle (2018), and most recently, City of Poetry (2019).