AND WE FINALLY VENTURE OUTSIDE
Kerry L Fleming

I’m choking,
drowning,
gasping for air.
It’s clawing at my lungs
and it’s tearing at my hair.

I know it’s blowing in the wind,
seeping
through my skin.
Ignoring my anxieties,
it keeps on pushing in.

I sense its heavy presence
as I steal
through empty streets.
I feel it breathing down my neck
and soaking round my feet.

It whispers round the vastness
of this suffocating
void

of a brave new world I now know
I can no longer avoid.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Kerry L Fleming

we dreamed of a better life, didn’t we?
a secluded existence far-removed
from civilisation

we imagined our wonderous utopia
where time loiters like shattered clocks

where beasts and birds and nature reign,
and mother earth resumes her cleaning, mending, adjusting.

we longed for quiet, didn’t we?
sweet isolation
endless days of carefree nothingness
hour upon hour of beautiful silence
where we are free to do nothing, something, anything…

we dreamed of this life, didn’t we?

BREATHE
Kerry L Fleming

a silent scream explodes.
muted anger bursting through cracks in a once reticent vent,
seething vapour spilling in whispers across oblivious faces.
frustration builds.
tumbling, twisting like a ravenous snake,
coiling around calmness
circling composure,
tightening, squeezing,
smothering every last ‘take a deep breath’
every ‘count to ten’
every ‘just walk away’

I want to run.
to release myself from stifling confines,
constant questions, constant wanting,
needing, niggling, fighting, arguing.
I want to soar
escape to normality and its rose-coloured spectacles.
I want to roar,
‘I’m a fucking person too!’

But as always,
the vent stays closed
and I breathe.

COVID THOUGHTS. MID-2020: IT’S BEEN FINE REALLY
Brian Stewart

Lockdown?
I suppose it’s been fine really.
I’m retired, so I’m used to working in my study, trying to write.
I get out on my bike or go for a walk every day, and I actually like the fact that the roads are quieter out there.
We had a long holiday on the other side of the world in February, so we don’t really feel cheated that we can’t travel now.
From our conservatory we can see the Tay, and Tentsmuir beyond, so we don’t feel like prisoners in our own home.
The sheds are tidy now.
The garden’s tidy now.
We’re FaceTiming the children and the two grandsons, keeping in touch
We’re Zooming with friends over Friday evening cocktails, marking the weekend as something different from the week.
I have Teams meetings with fellow Rotarians, and Zoom meetings with writer buddies, so I’m keeping in touch with the main groups I’m involved with.
It’s been fine.
Really.
But…
Going to Wimbledon for the first time would have been great, but it was cancelled.
We had tickets for Les Miserables in Glasgow, but it was cancelled.
The annual trip to Jura was planned, but it was cancelled. This one was a grey area: we don’t feel like ‘visitors’ there but we would have been, and it was clear that many residents did not want any visitors at all, so we respected that.
We’re starting to miss proper social contact, seeing people for real instead of on-screen.
We can’t visit my daughter to help out with two young children at home while they try to work.
And there are two big ones…
Today we heard that the daughter of an old friend had passed away from cancer. We can’t go to the funeral, can’t comfort the parents or her husband or her daughter
Our new grand-daughter was born premature seven weeks ago. She’s home and doing well. We’ve seen pictures of her, and we’ve seen her on FaceTime
But when will we be able to hold her?

COVID THOUGHTS. MID-2022: LOOKING FORWARD WITH HOPE
Brian Stewart

We’ve seen the ‘new’ granddaughter many times by now, and she knows us well and she’s thriving (though still catching regular colds after those months of isolation). She doesn’t know what she missed in those first two years of her life, but we do.
She has a new wee brother that we’ve seen and held many times since his birth. No gap there.
My daughter’s boys are doing well: the world has opened up for them, with swimming and football and cycling and school.
Our lives feel normal again: we’re travelling, we’re seeing people. There are still Zoom meetings, which avoid the pollution, time and expense of physically going to meetings, but that’s fine. In fact, we’re disappointed that some of the gains of Zoom have been reversed.

We’re furious at those government ministers who partied while we made those sacrifices. We’re angry that we ‘lost’ two years of our lives. We’re concerned that Covid is still with us despite politicians saying it’s all over.

And of course there will be other epidemics that we’ll somehow be unprepared for. And wars, and the consequences of climate change, and economic disaster. We used to feel we could protect our children and grandchildren, give them better lives than we had. But we can’t do that.

All we can do is prepare them as best we can to deal with whatever comes along. And give them hope.

HAIKU FOR LOCKDOWN
Ann Craig

In Scotland doors closed
shutters down, gates padlocked
but hearts still open.

HEIRLOOM
Eleanor Fordyce

It sits on my windowsill, waiting,
empty jug with frilled rim
and bulbous feet; dark green glass,
glinting in the winter sun.

It sat on her windowsill, bunched
full of snowdrops, green and white
innocence, still life perfection
in a kitchen of happy chaos.

Now snowdrops clump the wood;
the jug is filled to the brim
with her. I am that child again,
in awe of their beauty and her
unfailing faith in springs to come.

PANDEMIC
Elizabeth Frattaroli

Someone asked on Social Media if it was wrong she wanted Lockdown to continue.

That, with life on pause, she was discovering what was really important,

but that she felt guilty for enjoying the slower pace, the contraction of her world, when others were losing theirs completely.

The world outside is an unknown quantity, where invisible threats lie in the cracks of our old lives,

where even a visit to the supermarket feels threateningly alien; where forced separations make you yearn for physical solace – a touch, a hug, a greeting;

where loved ones aren’t able to comfort the sick, who die alone, as mourners mourn remotely.

And yet, in many ways we are closer than ever before and neighbourhoods, once lost in the frantic pace of life, draw close.

Ninety-nine-year-old Captain Tom walks on a Zimmer frame in his garden to raise money for our woefully funded NHS, and reminds us of our shared past and future, as a country salutes him.

Rainbows appear in windows to light the way as youngsters go on bear hunts upon colourful chalked pavements, and families stop, reflect, come together, insulate.

People bang pots and pans, clap in appreciation of our key workers, who sacrifice their safety for ours,

and community spirit, once on the verge of extinction in places, is no longer an endangered species.

And so I find myself also asking, is it wrong to hold on to some of what we’ve learnt, if the cause was a pandemic?

LOCKED DOWN
Ann Craig

Sticks and stones might break bones
but this place is not malicious
not a prison for me.
I never knew how the familiar
was like a drug, lulling me into a
feeling of surety, of known ground
rooting me, in this freefall of a world.
The walk from room to room
a meditation, the breath between
warm spaces, a mantra,
soup bubbling in the pot, wind in the roof
a sedative against uncertainty.

The sea roars, the birds still soar
shouting at clouds and stupidity,
today the sweetest gift,
a lark playing in the air
sang us a rainbow.
There was a smell of cut spring grass
I could hear a tractor trundle
the postie called hello from the gate
gave a thumbs up, we returned it.
We walk on a new path
made in the time of Covid.
See neighbours, keep our distance,
exchange shouted news,
laugh reassuringly.

A friend baked a cake shared a photo,
we all dutifully, digitally, drooled.
We now inhabit a new, without taste or touch,
binary fusion world, online pals on our knee,
framed, contained, but still there.
The sun rises and sets, the seasons turn,
the moon shines silver in the night sky
the stars look down.
The blackbird pours his heart out at dusk,
------he still sounds optimistic.

THE OVERTURN
Sandra Ireland

A pandemic is an upended flowerpot,
crammed soil tipped out onto the path
like a child’s sand pie. It’s messy,
a confusion of black muck.
The shape of before is just visible,
but the fragile outline is about to crumble.
The container has finally cracked.
It cannot hold its shape.

Once it held a perennial flowering,
blooms as predictable as the moon rising.
But it was an illusion. You’re
afraid to look at the mass of lives
creeping from the earth; uncertain, wriggling
creatures that never see the light of day.
They have always been here, you just
never saw them.

While everyone looked away,
the overlooked worked
to fertilise the soil.
This is where the roots are, the power, and
without that system the whole plant will die.
But now they are on top, the overlooked.
They have been tipped out into the light.
They are key to our existence.
Key workers.
They will not be so easily buried.

THE WORLD HAS SHRUNK
Wanda McGregor

The world has shrunk to faces framed
in screens
in windows
in doorways
as the death toll rolls and rolls
I step out onto peoples streets
a new world
of shop assistants shielded by Perspex
serving perplexed customers
cowering behind strained smiles
wielding plastic
no cash
I chap on door after door
most of them unanswered
stuffing leaflets like lifelines
in letterboxes.

And for once I noticed the walls
Instead of just looking,
and I saw that the world
to the face of a man on the telly
rummaging for microns hanging
onto his grey strands
lurking.
He once told me of a mouse loose in his house
he scrabbled on all fours on the floor
rummaging behind curtains,
a tv stand, a sideboard.
I grew bored, rolled my eyes, smirked and yawned.
But nothing prepared him, or me, for the scare of a corona lurking in his hair.

WHEN WILL THIS END?
Jan Strickland

When will this end? No one seems to know.
It’s changing everything we say, do or think,
as it travels between people to and fro.
There doesn’t seem to be an answer, what’s the missing link?

When will this end? We can’t go out.
We can’t greet our friends, hug or kiss.
We stand metres apart from friends and shout.
It’s the human contact that we all miss.

When will this end? We oldies are confused.
People are kind; they shop for us and bring in our bins.
We sit, watching TV, feeling old and bemused.
Is this the world’s punishment for all of our sins?

When will this end? Thousands are dying.
The hospitals and care homes are doing their best,
while the world’s politicians just keep on lying
and the frontline workers are all needing to rest.

When will this end?
Only God knows!