Hall of Mirrors

                                                                            

 Out of nowhere I have started thinking about an idea that drifted into my dreams a few times over the last week or so. It is the seed on a new poem and that pleased me as if it had entered my head through the curly-fizzy mass that is my hair, seeped into my brain and pooled in the warmth of my heart. So I will not rush it into anything more for the moment. It can have time to germinate, roll itself around in peace and calm. I will leave it undisturbed and hopefully it will come into bud and blossom into something all on its own, all of its own.

If I were to try to make a list of the things that had been damaged in my life during the course of the slimy swamp of Covid, my poetry that was a full flooding river that just poured out when I had a quiet moment, has been incarcerated inside me. This has not concerned me unduly since I have still been writing and having decided to record this strange time as fully as I my feelings went, all thought went in that direction. Poetry needs better than what the world has had to offer for the last four months.

That is not to say that I have not written any poems at all, but because with the amount of time and thought that my diary has taken from each day I have only written a handful of my little flowers as I think of them. I have used my creative side in the peaceful quiet world of my sewing projects that have flourished.

The aim of the diary these past months has been to make sure that I have a record of how one little old lady learned to cope with a complete change of lifestyle, not quite in total isolation because my husband has been by my side every moment of the fairground adventure ride this has been. Like a cross between a ghost train, roller coaster and an evil hall of mirrors.

It has been a time of reflection every bit as much as if I had been looking into a mystic wormhole into the future. In a time like this you can’t help but mull things over, wondering if you are on the right course, doing your best to stay positive even though at times you are not at all sure about anything at all.

Time will tell, as it does. My main focus has been to try to stay healthy and that involved not just going through the motions of keeping up my training regime, but to get it done with a better attitude. The whole time has been a tremendous test for us all. Some simply found that it sure was a test, and that the test was not easy, the result was dissatisfying and most depressing. From the start I wanted to avoid feeling sorry for myself since this hateful period has been happening to everybody worldwide. Rich and poor.

The end is not clearly in sight from where I am standing though the figures are starting to look less horrifying, the fact remains that in some places where people have simply carried on as usual, a new wave of cases has occurred. That had to happen as far as I can see which is further than the end of my nose, further than my own person pleasure.

Our own small antiques export and shipping business has taken the most horrendous nose dive and that will not recover for a very long time, since most of our clients are from other parts of the world. Historically most of our clients have been from the USA and they are in a worse state that we were. They are seeing the worst of it right now and it seems to me that the only person giving out ‘Fake News’…… Is in charge of the United States of America.