Off the coast of the Bronx
at the western end of Long Island
before ships landed: the home of the Siwanoy tribe
once the training ground of the 31st U.S Colored Infantry Regiment
according to records, a prisoner of war camp in 1864
later referred to as  "Potter's Field" or "City Cemetery"
then a quarantine station for yellow fever patients
as well as a women's psychiatric hospital & a tubercularium
on the west side of the islands
between an empty 4-acre space lived Solomon Riley's vision of black coney island during Jim Crow  
after the stay and departure of Pheonix house
Hart Island
now is the final resting ground for New York City's covid-19 victims
whose family could not or did not hire a private funeral director and so they were labeled "unclaimed"

There are more poems inside me, but I intuit it is longer fair to impose on you by sharing more.  The deep seeded infection of my spirit waxes and wanes, and there is no antidote, and unlike the virus itself, there never will be, a future cure, an inexpensive replacement cost for the spirit spent, the time and futures spirited away.

Perhaps you recall I was one mile away from Ground Zero on September 11th.  Rarely do I walk there.

The coronavirus poetry inserts itself unaided, never asking permission, a like minded, but a contra-cousin to the coronavirus.

I live in New York City, the epicenter where now, close to 800 die daily.

Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on Hart island, mostly for people whose families can't afford a funeral, or who go unclaimed by relatives.  In recent days, though, burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day.^^

Each dies with no last words, no Kaddish recited, Last Rites, too late, no Ṣalāt al-Janāzah or Om Namo Narayanaya.  Each one, a numbered pine coffin, and each one will have at the very least, a poem of their own, so help me god.

Buried side by side in large trench, room plenty for new arrivals,
I hear the banging, protesting, resisting, this is not the way, I was promised, my ears left pounding!  Hillel, the great scholar in this dream, reminds that “the time is short, and the work is great.”          

He paraphrases, though, “the bodies many, the poems too few.”

There ain’t no anonymity in heaven, but I’ll reconfirm that with you later.