In the Time of Covid-19

By Rosemary Power

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The urban friend of friend who wished,
though skilled in academe and internet,
to be when outside less
outside recovered knowledge
said, yearning to learn again:
 
‘I can’t join in enjoying
the weeds between the cracks
of walls and pavements and
our enforced time to look.’
 
But did you never
blow a dandelion
to tell the time;
chew honey from clover;
make a daisy chain;
yellow the chin with buttercup
to gauge your preference;
have a brush with a nettle;
prick yourself with thistles;
scratch yourself on brambles –
and eat the fruit the birds left;
 
see bindweed and buddleia
along the railway lines?
or ivy creep
 up boarded windows?
 
Did you never bus through hills
heathered and brackened;
see may spring white
beside the motorway?
 
Did you harvest conkers in the park;
see red of rowan, elder’s purple;
or watch the silver slender
of a wind-swayed birch?
 
Is it now so vast a task
To trust forgotten knowledge,
One foot in Eden, name
the vetch or celandine,
columbine, cuckoo-pint,
groundsel, forget-me-not?
 
Do we need to stoop again
with the close eyes of childhood,
lest we close our minds against
both neighbouring death
and greening earth,
 
bees feeding through flowers,
beetles below them,
birds above them;
    and the stars above us all? 

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Rosemary Power is a medievalist and writer whose new book Praying with the Book of Kells will be published by Veritas, Dublin, in 2021.

'In the time of Covid-19' first appeared in Voices Out of Lockdown (2020, ed. by Jan Such Pickard, Wild Goose Publishing) and e-Coracle (Iona Community). 

Rosemary's article 'The Lord of Creation in His Mother's Arms' was published in Foreshadow in January 2021.