How to Come Out of Lockdown (2022) Jim Moore 1 Someone will need to forgive me for being who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world with open arms, even though it has done to us what it has done. I wish I could love like that, instead of wanting to turn my back on it all, as if life in the world were a marriage assumed too young and necessarily left behind. Try as I might I will never become one of the world’s faithful ones. My naked face and your naked face, maskless. A cold March dawn, harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest, mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp worn on the forehead as you peer down into the wound. Nothing in this new life is asked of me except to remember how small I am. 2 Sometimes the world won’t let itself be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough. Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here, simply breathing because there is no other way to be with those who no longer can. I don’t know what to say about it all, but if you do please show me how to be you. In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago, before there were no more plays, they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star. Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence which it is now time for me to admit I have loved beyond any reason or defense. Who among us has not seen that star to the left of the lockdown moon, shining as the ship sets sail? --

※ 发信站: 批踢踢实业坊(ptt.cc), 来自: 114.36.41.125 (台湾) ※ 文章网址: https://webptt.com/cn.aspx?n=bbs/poetry/M.1649348593.A.BC8.html