A Lot On Her Plate

Our cell phone connection

is crystal clear,

my niece

a nurse who's routinely so calm

holds back crying,

she's been the final face

a few patients have seen

before they died

in her Long Island hospital,

whose 519 beds

are all COVID cases.

I listen and worry about

dangerous twelve-hour shifts

heartbreaking compassionate care

her husband home sick with mono again,

three college-age kids with cabin-fever

who must rebuild their backyard fence

blown down  by a windy rainstorm

so their dog Buster won't run loose.

Shit, she's got a lot on her plate.

We discuss other family members

in the New York hot zone,

I visited them all last fall

when none of us foresaw

a Grim Reaper virus

collecting the old and sickly,

the young and bullet-proof,

the cocky, the oh-so-holy,

the wrong-place-and -wrong-time victims.

After our conversation ends,

I stare at the dying sunset,

lilac orange amber crimson

a panoramic candlelight vigil

for those dead on the other coast

and a warning, quite clear, 

that darkness is coming.

--published in Behind the Mask: 40 Quarantine Poems from Humboldt County,  edited by David Holper and Anne Fricke, 2020.