A poem from my upcoming book Qun: Love is Unconditional

Current British poet laurate wrote a poem on the same theme see below. Two poems eyeing on the current lockdown phenomena from a different perspective. His one is more consoling while my poem insists more on taking a note on our dependence on God.

The question is, comes a catastrophe and of course we should try to overcome it by all means. At the same time, we may pass on without diving deep, without downloading the attached massage that it may come with. We can just skim through the email. But how long can we survive before seeing another catastrophe unfold on us? Because we might be ignoring an attached message.

Lockdown by Simon Armitage
And I couldn’t escape the waking dream
of infected fleas
in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor’s hearth
in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn’t un-see
the Boundary Stone,
that ****-eyed dice with its six dark holes,
thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.

Which brought to mind the sorry story
of Emmott Syddall and Rowland Torre,
star-crossed lovers on either side
of the quarantine line
whose wordless courtship spanned the river
till she came no longer.

But slept again,
and dreamt this time
of the exiled yaksha sending word
to his lost wife on a passing cloud,
a cloud that followed an earthly map
of camel trails and cattle tracks,
streams like necklaces,
fan-tailed peacocks, painted elephants,
embroidered bedspreads
of meadows and hedges,
bamboo forests and snow-hatted peaks,
waterfalls, creeks,
the hieroglyphs of wide-winged cranes
and the glistening lotus flower after rain,
the air
hypnotically see-through, rare,
the journey a ponderous one at times, long and slow
but necessarily so.

I'm maybe out....