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POETRY IN THE PLAGUE YEAR

Poems written during the Coronavirus Outbreak 2020

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Tamara Best 

Madoc ON, Canada 

 

 


 Tamara was a burned-out performer, activist, and community worker that fled to the woods of Eastern Ontario ten years ago to raise children, vegetables, and occasionally a ruckus. Largely self-taught, Tamara is in the process of revising a full-length book of concepts, ideas, and fragments of distilled thought (also known as poetry). 

Completed: 20th June 2020 

Broke/n 

I’ve long said that if everyone had a lifestyle like mine 

The entire economic system would collapse 

Businesses are shuttered 

Civilization is at a stand still 

Reduced to the point 

Of spending time alone 

 

If everyone lived like me 

We would all be nobodies 

            Working all day 

            Non-stop busy-like 

            But never actually 

            Going to work 

 

If everyone threw up their collective hands 

All of the machines would go quiet 

            Listen, they said 

            To nothing in particular 

            We came to find 

Silence 

 

If everyone dug deeply into earth 

And then put it all back as it was found 

            We wouldn’t 

            Be in this mess 

            We wouldn’t 

            Have any messes 

                         

If everyone started copying these habits 

The mall and everything in it 

            Would be nothing but 

An anachronism 

            Strange relics 

            Of an even stranger time 

 

Might not need to be fixed