Mourning # 11

Mourning # 11

 

I couldn’t stop crying if I wanted to

my relief check did not arrive

our town is in extreme lockdown again

yet the virus cuts down people like

wheat under the reaper’s scythe

my country’s taken over by madness

threatening charging good to fight

we’re already fighting, out of breath

I’m still shoveling mud out of the basement

and the landlord’s kicking me out on the curb

since I lost my sweeping job at the gym

I sit on the carpeted step

and get weak, weakened, break down

get down, wet-eyed.

 

---- Pamela Caddell had no funeral, that was the deal

her husband, Richard, wrote a plea for the newspaper

“It was her fervent wish that everyone take this horrible

disease seriously.” Pamela and Richard met as teenagers

while she worked as a carhop at a root beer stand

they married and had a son and a daughter, Pamela 

worked for many years as a nurse and then as caregiver

for her sister Debbie who had lung cancer, Debbie got

coronavirus first and died, then Pamela followed her

she was 71 years old and had been married to Richard

for 53 years, he now lives alone with the couple’s elderly

dog and is having trouble adjusting, “She never took away

from people and her greatest satisfaction was helping …

That’s the type of person Pamela was, and people should

know that. And she should not be dead. She should be

alive.”