No question, missing certain things

Feels bad — though I've seen sundry springs

I'd like to see this one as well

So staying home is . . . less than swell

And stay-home orders show how much

Mere grocery shopping was a crutch

Those solitary interactions

With subtle sensual satisfactions

Moving one's body out in space

The smile on some dark stranger's face

The careful joy of viewing fruit

Or choosing pulse, or leaf, or root

With manifest connoisseurship

A gasp, a frown, a curlèd lip

At radishes with weak limp greens ...

Then sharing pesto ways and means

Post-inquiry, with some smart clerk

(NOT with the one I've deemed a jerk —

These sharp unspoken judgments do

Provide a lift for me . . . and you?

With thought and wit in quarantine

Or drowned, in sugared thank-you streams

Poured out from all the media

All leaves me feeling — kind of bleah . . .

These corporate cries of gratitude

Undo my will-do attitude.)

Some say hindsight's twenty twenty.

Of course I feel the pain life's sent me —

Deaths, and dearth, and emptiness,

Adrift in arid hopelessness,

Forced to go on with shattered heart

Isolated, set apart

To labor far from any friend

Nurse where I love 'til brutal end

See last ties to my mother severed

(Soft nest she made, now gone forever)

Destruction of our family home:

Checked items in my life-loss tome.

But . . . heartbreak's normal, nothing shocking

When only my own world was rocking

From sudden blows of random fate

That kill your dear dreams while-u-wait.