So Covid comes.
Not a teller's version but real, lethal at the door.
There was something in the bookshelves that spoke of Covid but I could not remember what.
In was in there downstairs somewhere amongst old friends and strangers alike.
It escapes even though perhaps just metres away.
When Covid walked something called out from another place, persistent.
I needed to think of the name, then I could go nearer the bookshelf and see as though I was not a stranger from the dark, rudely peering at someone else's life.
I did not move in that direction for days.
I put the thought in a box as an envelope to store, when the night spoke once again, bringing me awake.
What was the name?
Don't go near the book it is too far away, another century, private.
Think instead of mother alive before the first great war, and father born during the greatest war that ever began.
Of where they went together and could often not meet.
The Spanish Flu meant nothing to a child growing up over the road from the Army Camp with its empty barracks, memories of marching and soldiering arms.
Think of their composure under death, separation by war.
More war, then father coming home with heavy hands and fractured heart we could not see,
his uncle long gone in European battlefields, couzins the desert took fighting for the pride of Ngati Pukenga. Warriors each.
Still, he did not speak when drawing his pictures to make a perfect world, a piano, and furniture maker he was, hands soft and caring upon the wood and charcoal alike.
There was no life in the empty barracks just away from our house behind where the mountain stood in its own watch, scoured for scoria, rock, long after its eruption of boulders and lava.
Then suddenly, there it was.
Love in the Time of Cholera, in the bookshelf waiting with the saints and ghosts of writers.
Then I saw, that now it shall be Covid that dies, blistered in the light.
