People, sallow skinned,
eat inside
curtained against august skies:
talk drifts ever over and again to dread,
or admissions of ignorance and grief confess
fires and floods suffocate speech,
remaindering covid’s breathless aftermath,
the antidote prescribed to to those
who must survive
without a sense of future
and little will to thrive,
to silent sentence, petrified.
Cherry Coombe 