Five Years, But Who Is Counting?

Sitting down to write this post, I am surprised (and mildly dismayed) to see that the last post I sent you was exactly one year ago—on my four-year anniversary of long covid. I guess you know what today marks, then, and why I’m here. I wanted to write you something new and heartfelt and ideally, deeply profound yet also a little bit hilarious, but I’ve been in a brain fog flare for a couple weeks now that’s making screen time and cognitive tasks difficult. So instead of a fresh, shiny post, I want to share three poems I’ve written about long Covid in the past year.

Maybe you don’t have long Covid. Maybe you have long [insert other illness] or long anxiety or long grief or long battle-to-put-food-on-the-table or long friction-with-mother-in-law. Everyone has some long struggle or another. I hope something in these poems will speak to that part of you. If you enjoy them, consider subscribing to my other (far more active) Substack, 100 Poems, where I share a poem and prompt every week. And for those of you who like silver linings and happy endings, I guess it’s worth mentioning that I never wrote poetry before getting sick, and I’m not sure I ever would have if my body hadn’t forcibly slowed me down.

Long Covid (1)

If it had just been my marriage,
I wouldn’t have minded.
I’d have slurped up freedom,
sudden freshness
of breathable air. 

But it came all at once,
I mean it left all at once—

health,
memory,
unshakeable faith in my own
survival.

Everything shuddered,
shuttered.
Everyone masked, and what did it
matter, I was already
unreachable,
pinned to my bed by
a room that never
stopped spinning

even after
the world spun on.  

I thought
I would lose my children.
I thought I would lose
my children.

Fear is sharp enough
to kill you, and sometimes,
sharp enough
to make you live.  

Long Covid (2)

The field is a sky
too vast for me to cross.
Constellations
glitter the ground,
dewdrops pulled from air 
like rabbits
from the blackhole
of some hat.   

I would long for magic, if I weren’t
too exhausted for longing,
would reach for hope
if anything
were within reach.
Starlings swoop like spaceships.

I tread through
bird breath,
through air whipped
by wing beat.

I am empty. 
I am dust.

I inhale until
I am made
of birds.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Long Covid (3)

When I could finally
walk downstairs,
I stumbled to the pear tree
by the back door and
bawled at the sight
of blossoms.

When I could finally
traverse the field beyond my yard,
I pulled to the woods, 
sank on a log. 

Cedar leaned close,
tethered to a snag,
life and death
entwined by a vine.

Snag swayed, and
cedar creaked, and
I cried,
heaving off carbon.
The leaves have fallen,

have budded
again and
again and 
again.   

There is still more
to exhale.

What long thing are you living inside of or trying to live beyond? Are there particular lines in any of these poems that spoke to you? Or particular bits of wisdom that you want to drop like breadcrumbs for those who are walking a trail of hardship similar to your own? I’d love to hear your experiences and reflections.