3 Poems

Kitty Costello

Ode to Soap

A repetitive acrostic

Savior of all people
Soothe our aching psyches
Scrub our appendages pristinely
Sluff off atrocious pathogens
Secure our antiseptic perimeter
Shelter our anxious populace
Stop our anguished panic
 
Sterile object assuring purification
Substance offering actual prophylaxis
Safeguarding orifices against proliferation
Scary organism’s armor punctured
Sanitary observance attenuating pandemic
 
Simply obey appropriate precautions
Social offering of altruistic prevention
Sane obsessive addictive preoccupation
Staving off agoraphobic paralysis
Stalwart opposition against plague
 
Sure, our apprehension predominates
Still our actions persist
Sanitizing our attitude properly
Sparking our angelic praise
Sustaining our adoring prostrations
Spurring outrageous acrostic poetry

April 2020

What Time It is

 
It's a different kind of morning
especially since it's 1:30 in the west coast
afternoon

still so near solstice
I woke up at 5
wondering if the sun had ever
gone all the way down last night

the all-too-familiar
quarantine jitters attending me
for no apparent reason

and after such a nice dream chat
with Governor Newson about
the fantastic job he's doing

then needlepointing my 
heebee jeebees into
the leopard print eyeglass case
that sat for a decade half-done
on a high closet shelf
until lockdown
now almost finished
(the needlepoint that is,
not lockdown)

sewing away until
virtual meditation time
then a teapot's worth
of chats with friends
across the bay
across the globe

Seattle, Toronto, Florence, Italy,
Saudi Arabia where it's almost
bedtime by now and
by the way
where no Muslims may travel
to Mecca this year
for their Hajj pilgrimage
due to covid fears

which never happened before
in all of history except
for during the Mongol invasion
of 12 hundred something

this 5th pillar of Islam
and so much else
not to be leaned upon
just now

and the next thing you know
it's not morning
anymore

July 2020

Taking Stock

Market shelves are emptying out,
the unstacked deck revealing
the profitability of doing nothing,
the industrial average of getting by without

A new kind of share is soaring--
the ultimate potlatch--
farmers, pickers, truckers, grocers
all exalted in uprisings
of perpetual cooperation

Invent the verb now
for stockpiling goodness
in mass proportions
May no one scramble
May no one suffer alone tonight

Have you inventoried yet?
Measured the worth
of the neighbor you always ignored,
now waving greetings
from an upper window?

Fewer sleep on the street tonight
for the first time since never
Schools empty out
yet matriculation is mandatory
as death becomes, once again,
our finest and most faithful teacher

The hand and the mouth
are riskier investments just now
but the always eminent heart
pays sky-rocketing dividends

Let jagged graph lines
zigzag their way
from heaven to earth
The measure we need is round

Some essentials
are too big to commodify--
the vast arms of god, the hands
forever washed in tears

Zero unemployment reported tonight,
each tending the work that only
everyone together can do...
the labor of love.

March 2020