Summer

one adder
does not
a summer make
as Aristotle
said not

---

First posted 9th June 2014.

Jobbing

© C A Lovegrove

Summer’s course is nearly run
Garden furniture guilt-trips
Rasp goes the sandpaper
Boing goes the tin lid
Slosh goes the paint

The paint is wet
And now it’s tacky
Drips smoothed out
And now it’s dry
Outside jobs are almost done
It just remains to gild the lily

---

First posted 8th November 2016.

Week upon week

© C A Lovegrove

Careful what you wish for.
A proper summer? Hot days
with wall-to-wall sunshine?

False memories of winter:
cloudy skies, gun-metal grey,
lashings of rain curtaining down.

Was it always like that?
Or were there blue skies in between?
And now we have week upon week

of parched lawns, diminished rivers, moorland fires and painful sunburn, sleepless nights and short tempers.

Bring back a touch of winter:
promise-crammed clouds of black and grey,
replenishing streams, greening grass,

dampening moorland, cooling skin
and brows. Blessed, blissful rain.

But – careful what you wish for.

---

First posted 30th June 2018.

Wrong keyboard

Looking for the key
to relieve utter boredom
keyboard caught my eye

Make a note to self:
touch-typing laptop keyboard
fails on piano

---

First published 6th January 2018, reposted (a day late) for Piano Day. This is “held on the 88th day of the year (29th March in normal years and 28th March in leap years) in celebration of and reference to the 88 keys on a standard piano.”

secrets

secrets shared
cease to be secrets
but untold secrets
suppurate, fester,
weeping out
their presence,
no words needed

---

First published 7th June 2014

X placeholder

Disease X,
a hypothetical pathogen
capable of causing
a future epidemic.

That’s what they told us.

Disease X, the placeholder name
for the very serious threat
posed to human health
by unknown viruses.

That’s what they told us,
back in 2018.

Disease X, on a pathogen shortlist
prioritised for research
by the World Health Organization.

That’s what they told us,
back in 2018,
but we didn’t listen.

Disease X, the sure knowledge
of a serious international epidemic
from a pathogen currently unknown.

That’s what they told us,
back in 2018.
But we didn’t listen.
And then it was too late.

---

Today’s coronaverse is brought to you by the letter X.

Update daily

Do you search for daily updates,
cases new, jabs, even death rates?
Data junkies, figure monkeys,
number mystics need statistics,
searching out the numbers’ meanings
but forgetting human beings.
Each and every Covid sufferer
is a father, child or mother,
sister, uncle, aunt or brother,
not a cipher, A N Other.

---

Today’s coronaverse doggerel is brought to you by the letter U.

Quarantine times

Forty days isolation,
that’s how it used to be
for Venetian plague ships,
quaranta giorni;
forty days for new mums,
impure until churched,
forty days for Jesus
in the wilderness,
forty days for fasting
in the time of Lent,
forty days of penance:
that’s how long they spent.

So stop your moaning
when told to quarantine:
it’s only fourteen bloody days,
not half a lifetime.

Outbreak control

Image generated from the text of this sestain from https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/

Whenever an outbreak emerges
authorities fear there’ll be surges.
Surges are hard to control,
with limiting them always the goal.
The best way to stop Covid’s spread?
Obey rules, or risk being dead.

---

This sestain is the latest coronaverse, brought to you by the letter O.

Boredom solutions

© C A Lovegrove

When each day feels like the next,
stave off boredom with a book.
Engage your thoughts with tale-based text
when each day feels like the next.
Novels keep grey matter flexed,
opened pages worth a look.
When each day feels like the next,
stave off boredom with a book.

---

Coronaverse: an alphabet of terms related to Covid-19. Tomorrow brings us the letter C.

Limbo

We’re all in a stateless state,
stuck between a life and death
with our need to isolate.
We’re all in a stateless state,
all bereft and desolate,
dying with each living breath.
We’re all in a stateless state:
stuck between a life and death.

The sharp touch

It creeps round my collar,
it slinks up my sleeves,
steals through the soles
of my shoes with such ease,
spies on the small of my back
and nips at the nape of my neck;
my fingers, my toes,
my ear lobes, my nose,
all start at the sharp touch,
the cold steel,
the grip
of winter