Self Isolation (a poem)

Your editor's nephew Daragh Byrne, son of Josephine and the late Des and living in Sydney, has crafted himself into a very good poet over the last few years. His latest and very topical creation is below.

Self Isolation

1.
Don't touch your face, and sneeze into your arm
Wash hands for two song lengths, cancel your plans
Maintain your social distance, let sanity

Be the first recourse of the mad, or dead.
Self isolation is the reasoned act
With all the world’s opinions spread out wide

And nobody is right, and everything
Is floating ten feet off the ground for lack
Of certainty. This is our way these days.

Yeats nailed it down, all slouching threat, the worst
And best are just ends of the opposite
Yet even his beast beached on time’s sharp shore.

2.
There is a sense that this is what we've asked -
Though we are still out prowling grocery aisles
For all the modern wonders of the day

In preparation, or drably ordinary.
The skies are thinned, planes grounded, factories
Have ceased their toxic belch. The air, itself

Again suffused with nagging particles
Might get a moment's rest. Perhaps the shape
The future's going to take is being traced out:

We lose each other in the news, undead
Divided, cautious, or even redeemed
In a resurrection of the social cloth

A freshly stitched bright coverlet of hope
Or both win out and we remain the same
Not wrong nor right, just paradox of us.

Daragh Byrne (c)

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