We stopped touching strangers in the early days of spring,
We learned the names of variants the way you’d learn to sing,
A children’s song in increments, a new verse every week,
Until the whole catastrophe became a kind of bleak.
The restaurants had stickers on the tables showing space,
The little markers spelling out exactly who could face,
Each other over food without the regulation fear,
And we called this the new normal in the plague year.
Plague year, plague year, everything we touched turned strange,
Plague year, plague year, we didn’t know the full exchange,
We were counting up our contacts and we stayed inside our lanes,
Plague year left its signature on all our window panes,
Plague year, plague year, we survived it and we changed,
Plague year, plague year, everything we built rearranged.
The grocery store at seven in the morning was the slot,
Reserved for the immunocompromised and the older lot,
I went there once to help my neighbor’s mother fill a cart,
And saw the fear of surfaces written on every heart.
We learned the oxygen saturation number and its range,
We learned the specific protocol for testing that was strange,
We learned the difference between isolated and quarantined,
And which of us technically qualified for which routine.
The hardest thing was watching someone die on video call,
A phone propped on a table at the end of every hall,
Because the ward was sealed and the family couldn’t come,
And the last thing that they heard was through a speaker going numb.
The plague year passed and nobody agreed on what it meant,
Or whether we’d been right about the measures that we spent,
Or whether the economy or the body was the cost,
Or which of all the things we shut down we could count as truly lost.