2022 – the year of attention

‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’ Simone Weil

A little diary entrance for beginning of the new year: if 2020 was the year of Fear, then 2021 will be remembered as the year when I stopped remembering what it feels like ‘to feel good’.

I don’t mind repetition – remember, remembering, feel, feel. It signifies the year of repetition. If only I could feel, feel again in 2022 what I couldn’t feel in 2021.

The year of separate bedrooms, earplugs and clouds passing by in the window.

Teenagers talking to each other at night.

The year of flower deadheading and robins nesting in the shed.

The year I stopped reading books.

The year I stopped ‘seeing’ my husband.

The year I lost the job.

The year of UNFEELING as a way to survive.

A selfish year, full of my own little problems.

In 2022 I want to start paying attention.

To words I am reading.

To people I am seeing.

To food I am cooking.

Attention is truly the rarest.

Image by Geralt on Pixabay

This strange March

In Memory of March 2020 Lockdown

Not a month, but short for Martha or Marjory perhaps.

Her frosty lips touching the petals of daffodils,

soaked up the hail from yesterday

and I say ‘Hail, Mary – the March is on its way,

hurling down from heavens.

Water and wind confusing each other in one sick dance

getting bolder, entering living rooms, whispering strange songs

whizzing around ears, sneezing into eye balls.

Ghosts used to visit wintertime but in 2020, they’ve stayed until spring.

The bony fingers reach for a pack of cards and out comes the Joker.

Lost in the middle is us – all of US, waiting to be summoned;

‘Where’s the light? But wait, not yet’.

The phantoms are rummaging through cards,

the old bones in charity shops have not been this busy since 1991.

Their eye balls colour of winter grey

and the teeth silver foil.

The cards are getting bigger and bigger

and now they’ve appeared on TV.

Tangled graphs and dancing nodes

to the tune of Spring that stalls

and Death that strolls,

stopping everything.

Hope chests

Chests.

Golden chests,

embossed,

oak chests,

hope chests,

with linen and wedding oaths,

futures tucked away

with smell of jasmine

and laundry

and furniture polish…

But today,

I am thinking of billions of human chests,

breathing chambers,

givers of life,

invisible lanterns,

chambers of tender souls,

keys to self,

entrapments of hearts,

crimson butterflies,

warriors against plague,

fumigating torches

scattered around hospitals

in London, New York, Bergamo and Birmingham.