Wuhan
Came and spun the
Human
Psyche
Rightly
Flipped the W in wealth
To the H for health
Took our flighty fancies
No more hugs or kisses.
Forget soft hands
Or warm embraces,
Click on the icon,
See only faces,
Half-dressed,
Toys about,
A messy life,
Being lived throughout.
Middle-classes
Q outside of Waitrose
Stocking up in the throes
Of a pandemic
So epic
Prolific
Spread across the pacific
Neither racist, bigoted nor specific -
Just horrific.
Our universe
Unleashed her infected breath
Into the air,
A vomit of what
We’ve fed her -
Coronavirus,
You’re tireless,
And now the pied piper
Comes to collect,
Shutting stores
And grounding jets,
Food to go,
Rush back home,
Live your life through a phone.
Life has quietened down to a hum,
A scaled back song used to blare
Into our daily living,
Notes of doing,
Replaced by silent stressing,
As key workers
Lift the weight of
The shirkers
Of responsibility,
It’s plain to see
The callosity
Time to use that money you taxed me!
It's more than distance
We’ll have to get.
There’ll sadly still be a debt
We’ll feel as we
Hear the sighs
Echo across skies -
Those lives.
There’s no going back to the ways of old
‘Cause this dis-ease
Is showing up the degrees
Of imbalance
The nonchalance
Of a Z generation
Taken
In by continued corporate molestation
Willing to forsake the aged
They’re waiting
For things to go back to shaking
Got feeds to feed and moves to be making.
Nah human, it’s not that way
We’re all stuck in this repeated day
Talking, writing,
Sharing feelings
Cooking, planting
Doing healings.
How you feeling?
Locked down
Boxed up
Closed in
Freaked out?
Time-out.
Slow it down.
There’s no getting out of town.
Look around
What’s been found?
Heroes revealed,
Liars exposed,
Cracks in the system,
Solutions imposed.
People are now talking
‘bout crashing economies
Built on inequalities,
We’ve been led to believe
Could not be relieved.
People are now seeing
That you can work from home,
Take meetings on the phone
Cut down your commute
Produce without rebuke.
People are now hearing –
Business is more than the
Profit and the loss,
The triple bottom line
Has to factor in the costs.
People.
Planet.
Profit.
None can thrive alone
Just like we’ve come to feel
Isolated in our zones.
Idle hands, chafed bums,
Back we go to the humdrum;
To the what’s important,
In the end,
The food, the family and the friends.
Priorities need re-ordered,
We’ve had them in reverse.
Or things will not get better
Until they get much worse.
By Layla Maghribi
See Layla perform Flip the Human here