Nancy Agabian's contribution to our Call for Poems on the topic of epidemics, illness, medicine, death and healing

Nancy Agabian of East Walpole, MA, USA has shared her original poem. APP thanks her.

Into the Needle

If the virus doesn't ever go away

            or worse, worsens, what will I do?

            I don't let my mind go there. I stay close

            to the day, the hour, the minute,

            the present, I sew a mask, stitch

            by stitch, the prick of the needle,

            a small dash of thread, one moment

            into another, a thought leading

            to the next--

Sometimes I let myself imagine a

            new year, a new home, a new

            line of work. Surroundings change

            and I'm the same, my body superimposed

            on a background like Colorforms,

            a toy from childhood. The real magic:

            the way two surfaces stick together

            without glue, an object peeled and fixed

            onto a picture, belonging, temporarily.

I know life's not this smooth,

            like glass, like the surface of a still pond.

            It's rough and ragged, jagged

            as a mountain no one has ever

            seen before. I must train to

            scale this passage, but perhaps I am

            building new muscles, however

            slight: a shift of the eye, a snip of thread

            cut square, a breath in, and out, of care.