Monica Raymond
Waiting for the Surge
This is what you need
to do to help—lie low
and let bright sun
burn through your window
burnishing you, no need
to jump up, blazing stars
take to this or that cause
with scimitars.
No, just as you were
in the first days
hearing quarrels you could neither
quench or appease,
your heart a field of grief.
Only now you know
as ambulance sirens
keen past your window
it was never yours to stop them.
And so, as packages of pandemic
tumble, hooded patients
chuff and cough, and heroic
nurses leave for work
in the early morning,
know yours is the path
of sitting, waiting, watching,
your heart a field
turned tawny by the sun.
“May all be well,
may what is done be done
in peace, may everyone
be safe” the field of gold
the sun makes possible.
Lay low and hold
the jagged earth, pebble, squabble,
in its fading glow.
It’s still morning. There’s a day, a world
left to come through. Lay low.
—Submitted on
Monica Raymond has received awards and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in both poetry and playwriting, as well as from the Jerome Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. She held an 18-month residency at Central Square Theatre as one of the PlayPen Playwrights. Her play, The Owl Girl, won the PeaceWriting Award (granted jointly by the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology), as well as the Castillo Theater prize in political playwriting, and a Clauder Competition Gold Medal. An artist and teacher as well as a writer, Raymond lives in Cambridge, Mass.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.