Poem - For My Daughter - Kim Moore

And later, when she asks I’ll say 

some parts of it were beautiful-

how in their brightness
and sudden opening
the faces of the neighbors
began to look like flowers.
I’ll tell her how we began
to look back at photos
of our younger selves
with our arm around a stranger
or leaning on the shoulders of friends,
and saw that touch
had always been a kind of holiness,
a type of worship we were promised.
I’ll tell her that in some ways
our days shrunk to nothing,
being both as long as a year
and as quick as the turning of a page.
I’ll tell her how she learned to crawl
in those days, in those times
when we could not leave,
when bodies were carried
from homes and were not counted,
that she began to say her first word
while death waited in the streets,
that though I was afraid,
I never saw fear in her eyes.

(Poem about COVID lockdown, Commissioned by Ledbury Poetry Festival)