Will We Desire Touch?

LORETTA DIANE WALKER

March 25, 2020

After the COVID-19 kryptonite

is discovered, will we desire touch—

that primitive longing

swaddled in our lives before birth?

Will it be more desirable 

than clasping light between our teeth

in a world darkening with dread?

Before this phantom smuggled

panic into our lives, 

beliefs broke friendships,

family relationships,

kind words became crushed bricks, 

crumbled from the weight 

of anger’s battering.

Curious how this fear forces wide

       the circle of distance,

how the invisible separates us.

And those souls who depend on a stranger’s touch

for comfort: a brush of fingertips from the grocery clerk,

a bump from the waitress burdened with too many trays,

a pat on the back from the worker at a soup kitchen,

the volunteer who rocks an orphaned child

in the neonatal intensive-care unit.   Is there a surrogate for the warm arch of flesh?

Oh! To fill air and lungs, lives and loneliness

with the dust of crushed kind words.

Let their film cover computer, 

telephone, television screens.

Let their residue stick to hands flush against glass 

as they reach for companionship from the pit of isolation.

And for those whose hands cannot reach

beyond cardboard boxes, may they hear 

friendly voices echoing from heart-to-heart

in this dark season of distancing.

LORETTA DIANE WALKER, a musician who plays her tenor saxophone sometimes, a teacher who still likes her students, and an artist who has been humbled and inspired by a collection of remarkable people and poets, is learning to navigate digital teaching. She has stockpiled jigsaw puzzles to calm her anxiety.