Pandemic Haiku
Becky Boling
Yesterday we talked
from our tiny square boxes,
pixelated stars.
Screens, glass, wood, and brick
even air separates us.
Thoughts alone transgress.
Stories play on walls.
Words rattle in closed space.
We dream sky and clouds.
Skin untouched withers.
Like cupped palms, my ears open
to catch your song voice.
Three minutes ago,
tossing crumbs to hungry souls,
we spoke our names.
Small kindnesses come
wrapped in distanced smiles, ferried
on muffled voices.
About Becky Boling
Becky Boling, retired professor, has published prose (Proyecto Sherezade, The Ekphrastic Review, Lost Lake Folk Opera) and poetry (Willows Wept Review, Martin Lake Journal, Persimmon Tree, Northfield Sidewalk Poetry, and Red Wing Arts’ 19th Poet-Artist Collaboration). In 2020, her poem, “Owls,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her dramatic monologues were performed and broadcast for Northfield’s SOLOS: Monologue Writing and Performance Festival. Her poems were featured in Pandemic Poetry, End in Mind, a video series narrated by Cathy Wurzer of MPR (2021). Transplanted from southern Indiana, she flourishes, like dandelions, in Minnesota soil.