Today's poem is by Kim Roberts

COVID UPDATE
       

How can I look away? The charts have such a compelling quality, a magnetic pull: changing the daily rates of mortality into wave patterns, changing family tragedies into a ticker tape of graphs and numbers. An evolutionary biologist says it's a function of human survival, that we've evolved to engage with the horrible. But this seems worse: not a morbid fascination, but a hardening of my senses that makes the soul smaller. I've begun to see artistry in the depiction of time on the x-axis and death on the y-axis. To compare countries by arcing lines of contrasting colors. To correlate crests with holidays, to follow the jet stream of future predictions shown with a series of dotted lines. My heart constricts. On the web sites, it's all laid out neatly, bloodlessly: the positive cases, the death rates, the number of inoculations given, the ages and races of the victims. How can I look away? This is how we map our loss. All those beautiful curves.

Copyright © 2024 Kim Roberts All rights reserved
from Corona/Crown
WordTech Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission