Memorial Day
a poem about guilt
Memorial Day
“Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.”
- Wislawa Szymborska
Forgive me for not grasping the magnitude.
Forgive me for yesterday when I lay in the grass.
Forgive me, I could afford to stay safe.
I’m sorry it took me months to cry; I was so busy
coping, making dark jokes and performing
my identity: tough cookie. I’m trying to translate
this experience into an artifact that will mean something
to readers of the future. I want them to know the era
our new normal was still new, how I wore my mask
to buy a pint of gelato because the season turned,
how I went outside and locked eyes with a robin
whose life is no worse without us. Forgive me
for I now understand the mindset of millionaires
following the news stories of the corrupt and inept,
the sick and the hungry, the hopeless, thinking,
but what can I, one person, do, while their small bubble
stays afloat on the current of good fortune.
Forgive me my gelato, this is a guilt poem.
Readers of the future, my apologies,
we were incapable of holding the whole catastrophe
in our heads, and so the paper of record printed
a meager accounting of the lives of the dead:
Helen Boles Days, 96, made what she had
work for her; Latasha Andrews, 33,
always the first to offer help
to those in need; Nita Pippins, 93, mother
to a generation of AIDS patients;
Melford Henson, 65, fell ill in prison
shortly before he was to be released.
I held the wall of names and turned
the pages with my inessential hands.
Click here for the New York Times’s interactive accounting of lives lost to coronavirus.
Poet-in-Residence is a newsletter of poems about life during quarantine written by Leigh Stein, the "poet laureate of The Bachelor." New poem every Tuesday and Thursday. Forward this to a friend who feels guilty, too.