a bad case of the asymmetrical blues 
or how to survive a pandemic

a cracking, thrumming, vibrating, anxious heart
beating, 
rising,
throttling,
digging deeper into paranoia,
drifting into illness,
echoes around the world.
body counts,
pieces of humanity strewn 
across the sky,
hidden in the Duomo
tattered and weary,
the end of the world.
the end of time.
then suddenly space – 

everywhere, 
                                                                            
                               anywhere,

                                                         nowhere.
                                                                                                                      

space on a page 


and in the sky.
luminescent, transcendental.
nothingness, emptiness, stillness.
no sound; no waves;
no footsteps.
just the grass greening,
birds singing,
clouds clouding; sun sunning.
awareness in this vast space – the horizon-less horizon.
before me the empty sky.
and then I hear it
your soft heart beating – beat, beat, beat --
against mine. 

 


teddy and the whale

staring into the abyss
as death sits on my shoulder,
stars dancing on a tapestry of golden snowdrops.
how precious this life – edgeless, limitless, expansive.
a new generation, melting into the now-ness of now. 
the spaciousness of birth and death,
the coming and going of time. 
a gasp, silence, grief, joy
seeping into the night sky,
opening to the wonder. 
an explosion of the before and the after – the big bang.
together and gone
into the land of the long white cloud,
as teddy and the whale play on.

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Debra Black is a former feature writer and news reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper. Over her 28 plus year career there she won a number of national awards for her journalism, including the National Newspaper Award. She also has won a number of awards for magazine writing prior to her working at the Star. Her poems were first published in University of Toronto literary magazines in the mid-1970s when she was a student. The magazines have long gone, but her love of the written word and poetry has not disappeared. Her most recent work appears on the prestigious literary website the Queen’s Mob Teahouse. To view those poems go to this link: https://queenmobs.com/2019/10/poems-debra-black/

Throughout her career as a journalist, she covered public policy issues such as education and immigration and diversity and has interviewed some of Canada’s leading politicians, writers and thinkers. She has travelled extensively and taught journalism in Rwanda and covered the HIV crisis in South Africa and Swaziland for the Star. While working and raising a child, she continued to write poetry for herself and others. Having left the Star, she now teaches yin yoga and meditation and spends many an hour writing and polishing her poetry, exploring the human condition and themes of love and existence.

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