amber chism Poet Rhyme

we never came back

We were told to stay home,
It wasn’t safe for our faces to be shown.
We closed the doors,
Mopped all the floors.
We stopped touching,
Freaked out if anyone was approaching.
We Stopped gathering,
Put all our effort into scattering.
We Stopped lingering too long in grocery store aisles,
Suddenly suspicious of strangers smiles.
We Stopped letting strangers get close enough to breathe the same air,
There was no more county fair.
We learned the distance between six feet and loneliness,
the difference between silence and emptiness.
And when they finally told us it was safe to come back—
some of us never really got back on track.
We returned to work,
For many a small perk.
We returned to stores,
Felt the smog return to our pores.
We returned to restaurants and crowded parking lots and birthday parties,
All while grieving those who would never reach their forties.
But something stayed behind,
Something that couldn’t be fixed with merely hitting rewind.
Maybe it was trust,
Something long since left to rust.
Maybe it was innocence,
A cold reminder of our existence.
Maybe it was the ease of being near,
Without calculating every breath we could hear.
Maybe it was conversation,
Or our patience with human interaction.
We learned to wave from a distance,
How quickly fear could become our existence.
To love through a screen,
No longer needing to primp and preen.
To say “I'm fine” When we knew what we really meant,
Our sanity forever bent.
We learned that solitude could feel like peace,
And sometimes peace was easier when everybody else would cease.
We made our homes our fortresses,
Hiding away from life's distresses.
Our phones became our windows,
Our screens became our doors.
somewhere along the way, we stopped knocking on each other's doors,
Content to just focus on chores.
The world kept moving around us,
But for some, it became less of a fuss.
Sometimes we simply learned how to move without being seen,
We lost our hospitality and became mean.
And maybe that's the strangest part—
They told us we could come back,
But for some we never really came back.

-A

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