I am sure you have noticed it, too. People die
and the bereft go into strange quarantine. It is
not, of course, their grief we mean to contain,
sparing the frail and the hale alike. Even we
poor fools know better than that. No, the disease
is unease.
No need to panic: the stricken will hold
a hand to the keening mouth as automatically
as doctors snap masks on their breathing.
Jane Zwart teaches literature and writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Rattle, Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Poetry Review (UK), Threepenny Review, MARGIE, and North American Review--as well as elsewhere. She has also published edited versions of onstage interviews with Christian Wiman, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith.
