It’s the end of the world
& we can’t even gather together
alone: isolated: panicked
life, as if eclipsed by a prolonged longing
time suspended, hanging by a hair
off a crumbling ceiling.
On this Friday the 13th,
a boy in 4th grade makes face masks
with paper towel and thick pink elastics
before school closes for three weeks.
A mask for each parent & child
as we play our parts in the global
pandemic of paranoia
aired 24/7 through waves and wires.
When the last Act arrives
before the curtains drop
the public, aroused by shared catharsis
will have been changed
epiphanied: the end was revealed
to be a new beginning:
after decades of factory fumes and traffic buzz
bird melodies and haze-free skies
across empty squares, song
swing and waltz on livened balconies.
Coronavirus has staged
the most monumental tragedy:
the death of the separate & autonomous individual
& the re-membering of a new humanity
not almighty and deadly
but dangerously vulnerable
humbled
by a zombie-like microscopic thing.
Sanita Fejzić is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University (Canada).
Her interdisciplinary work investigates the relationship between cultural
production and environmental ethics. She has co-edited two anthologies with
Carleton University's In/Words Press including Refuge(e) in 2016 and Dis(s)ent
in 2018. Psychomachia, Latin for “battle
of the soul,” Fejzić’s first book of fiction, was shortlisted for the Ken
Klonsky Novella contest (2015) and the Canada ReLit Awards (2017). (M)other and
its French translation, Mère(s) et monde, have just been released by Bouton
d'or Acadie, a Children's press.
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