Pandemic Poems for Us All #6

Super moon. Today, wifi went down a dozen times, a file wouldn’t load, and I burned the cookies. This poem addresses all that.

Full Moon Poem

The moon, full; Internet, down,
some glitch with centurytel.com,
some glitch with the century too—
coronas in cahoots, and panic attacks

and then we’re crawling out of cubicles,
free of monitors and Zoom,
and all those uploaded articles,
and while the servers spin

their rainbow balls eternally,
we walk out into the newly minted night,
call across the parking lots,
note how the moon cybers

sight, pixilating with silver
the downloaded shadows of trees—
through which we can almost see
those nocturnal ones, those

with hearts not unlike our own,
mice and rabbits on the lawns,
voles who, unlike us, see fully
in the murk. They are with us now;

we can hear the rustle of tiny paws,
hear even the rush of winged owls
slipping between silence and the clouds.
Here we stand, off line, listening at last,

forgetting what we did with all that sight,
here among creatures like ourselves,
shifting between dead ash and pine.
Now we hear it, a rediscovered stream,

not far off, running high, leading us
to the shore, a lake where winds raise
wild surf, white-capped thought. The only
other sound to ease our loneliness,

our beautiful loss of purpose,
is the cry of star-flying geese,
headed north, guiding us now
through this dark and crazy night.