Kimberly O'Connor

You’ve probably come across articles or stories this week about the fifth anniversary of COVID. This long, reflective NYT op-ed is interesting (I’ve gifted it so it should be free to read for a month or two.)

It reminded me that in 2023, when things were starting to feel “back to normal,” I wrote this sestina. A sestina is a poem that uses six-line stanzas to repeat the same ending words in a specific pattern. The words I chose to repeat in my pandemic sestina are crisis, march, down, alone, sick, and mask.

Pandemic Sestina 

If spring is a crisis 
then what is a March 
when the world shuts down? 
I was already home alone 
for a week, sick,  
gathering groceries, no mask, 

coughing at checkout, trying to mask
my illness, before the crisis 
officially began. I’d been sick 
for weeks, all of March, 
so I was already alone. 
Then the world shut down. 

When it all went down,
we rushed to find masks. 
Stuck at home together, or alone. 
What began as crisis 
faded into summer. We marched 
against another kind of sickness. 

The whole world was sick. 
We gathered in our tiny downtown 
in honor of George Floyd, to march. 
Two hundred people, chanting, masked. 
It felt silly in light of the crisis, 
its size and history. Alone 

at Thanksgiving; at Christmas, alone. 
Half a million people sick, 
even more in crisis: 
depression, unemployment. Downtown 
nearly deserted, a few masked 
people walking dogs. Back to March. 

It won’t end, this march 
toward an unknown future. Alone 
at home, I take off my mask. 
The vaccine makes me sick 
for two days.  I lie down on the floor. 
If this long crisis

ends, what masked disaster will follow? March 
returns and returns; if spring is a crisis, we alone 
face the sickness. We choose: stand up, or lie down? 

Photo by Pam Menegakis on Unsplash

Writing prompt (because, why not?): If you haven’t done it already, take some time to reflect on how the pandemic impacted your life.