Compassionate leave
19 March 2021 | Ingrid De Kok ALE under Covid-19
Almost everyone's on leave,
gone away
to the countryside,
in threadbare trucks
to pay respects
in rooms and huts
to watch and pray for dying ones
shrunken under sheets,
to vigils through the night
in closed off streets
where grandmothers prepare
small and smaller funeral feasts
after truncated prayers
chanted by tired priests
over cardboard caskets
in the deathwatch heat.
Gone to taxi ranks and stations
to wait for information
From billboards, radios,
word of mouth and trumpets in the sky
where ubiquitous hadedas,
unlike Auden's mute impervious birds
blast their high shofars*
over each infected space.
* war crys