It feels like today is either the 45th of April or the 273rd of January.

All I know is that it’s a Tuesday and Ireland is (still) in lockdown.

I no longer know how many days we have been in lockdown.

It’s enervating.

I haven’t wanted to write lately, or I have but I haven’t known how to write my way through any of this. That turns into not wanting to write. Refusing to write. Throwing my hands up in the air at the existential impossibility of saying anything about anything at the moment.

But then I read this piece by George Saunders in the New Yorker, and the story in there about Anna Akhmatova lodged itself in my brain.

Can I write this?

How would I even begin?

Fittingly, the last time I posted on this blog was to sing the praises of Dark Angels. I still credit that course last year with boosting the heck out of my confidence as a writer, and I still treasure all my  memories of it.

My boss asked me a while ago if I’d been getting my exercises from Dark Angels by email. I hadn’t! What exercises? She sent me on one, and then I rummaged in my email and discovered just how dumb junk mail algorithms can be. A mail from Dark Angels is not junk, Outlook. How very dare you! Some light (muttered) swearing, adding of email to Contacts and a rescue mission to move those messages back into their very own folder later, I read through the mails.

They had reading and writing exercises in them. An extremely kind expression of solidarity, an offer of distraction, a way to find inspiration, to fight our way out of the fog induced by waves hands everything.

Yet still it all seemed impossible.

But as I went through my days, most of them indistinguishable from one another, the exercises kept rattling around in my brain too.

(Lots of vacant space for rattling in my brainpan.)

But then I opened a google doc.

And wrote in it.

Here are the first three exercises—prompt in bold.

#1 Yellow is the colour

Of the closed off

Seats on the bus which drives by

Empty, clean, and safe

 

#2 I am

A discarded medical glove, 

Removed by a teenager with an itchy hand.

Shoved in a tracksuit pocket 

Halfway home from the supermarket.

No longer useful, slick from palm sweat. 

He grimaces as he flexes his hand, 

Gummy talcum lodged in the joints of his fingers.

His skin overwashed, flaking and starting to crack.

He whistles,

(Feigning insouciance)

Bounces on his toes.

He’s not worried, not him. 

He’s young, he’s tough, he’s got this. 

He bounces some more.

Shadowboxes the virus. 

Grunt, punch, grunt. 

He’s breathing faster.

It’s the exertion.

(It’s not, it’s panic).

Punch, lunge, feint. 

I fall out of his pocket

Into the grass.

Unseen.

A lost totem of his fears.  

 

#3 Hope is the thing with axes, points, and a curve

We all want to flatten.

My own hope moves up and down the line

Distracted, an unfixed point.

Sunshine and cherry blossoms

Nudge me toward happy.

Dad having a fever and a cough

Chutes me down to misery.

This pause we are all in

Has become pregnant.

We watch behind splayed fingers

To see our world reborn.