Friday, April 17, 2020

Bittersweet honey

I don't know about you, but I am so distracted I can't sit long enough to read a chapter in a really good book. I can't write articles or essays even though I am determined to journal my thoughts for my great grandsons, but I can't do it just yet. Not because the situation is fluid, but because I am not ready to sort through EVERY thing going on and how the pandemic is affecting all of us. But I will.

For the past two weeks I have been participating in Washington University St. Louis, Humanities Dept. Poetry Prompt. They provide five words to be used in a short poem. The resulting poems are incredibly diverse and interesting. My submission for today is about my great grandson Liam.

I asked him recently why he wasn't in school and he explained, "This germ virus gets in your mouth and people die. And I don't want to get it really bad in my mouth."  (Breaks my heart.)





                    A soft bee incubates inside my young one's mouth. 
                                               Honey lubes his shattered-glass little boy gut. 
                                               Exhausted from rest, stacked weeks-high,
                                               each time he hacks up fear in a warm gust
                                               he wonders if this time HE has been stung.
                                               "I don't want this in my mouth, really bad, Nana.
                                               People get a cough and die from it."

                                               I'm bringing home a baby bumble bee...

                                               Linda O'Connell 4/17/2020


Missouri Historical Society is doing a project on the Pandemic, requesting submissions, images, videos, words etc.
So I submitted this poem and photo of my sweet Liam who is missing school "really bad."

3 comments:

Sioux Roslawski said...

What an incredible poem, inspired by Liam.

It's like we're suspended in time. Like we've been trapped in a drop of tree resin, and we're "frozen" there--for how long, we're not sure.

janet smart said...

Until now, I think most of us have been lucky in our lifetime. I've never had to deal with epidemics like they had in the old days before vaccines and medicines became available. Liam is such a sweet little boy and the poetry prompt that Washington University is doing sounds interesting. I might look it up on the internet. Sometimes prompts are what it takes to get me to writing.

Connie said...

Your poem captures the emotion well. It breaks my heart too that this pandemic even exists and that we must find some way of explaining the horrors of it to our young ones.