A Wish During a Season of Pandemic

. . . please send me home now,
to my beloved country. My heart yearns
to go back home.
                 --from Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

Yes.
Please send me home
to the Before where my friends and I
met every other Wednesday
to eat bacon and eggs sunny side-up
while discussing books and films
and our mothers and that man in the White House
and knitting and bridge and travel plans
and partners and the pain
aging bodies inflict on young souls
and the joys and sadness that adult children
bring in their wake.
Please send me home to that again.
Yes.

Dawn Will Come

Telemachus, this is impossible,
for us to drive when it is pitch-black night,
however eager we may be to travel.
Dawn will come soon.
                           --from Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

I stand in my garden
assessing the growth,
surveying the half-hidden
heads of hyacinth emerging
from the hard ground--
the slow unfurling of the
black-petaled lenten rose--
the green shoots of daffodils,
their tips bulging with
unseen yellow blossoming--
I smell rain somewhere
in distant air, its scent
both sweet and sharp,
promising a new season for me
and for my tiny piece of earth.

Depression.3

Some god who guards
and watches over you will send fair wind
behind your sails.
          from Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

O, God, who watches over me
please send soon a fair wind
to blow away the silt and salt
that cloud my vision,
making me unable to see those
tender shoots of green in my garden
or hear the conversations of
early morning birds who roost
beneath my spring window.
I have resided too long in this port.