"april is the cruelest month..."

Oh, T.S. Eliot, if only you knew...the trees are budding, and flowers gently awakening from a winter that wasn't...soon the grass will be lush and green...tulips opening to the sun...but we won't...we will briskly walk past them...if we can...peering above our homemade mask lines...plodding onward...afraid to really breathe deep...and we will be the lucky ones if we do...I have come to my own conclusion based on whatever brain cells I have left in this 59-year-old brain...a few weeks away from 60 and entering an age group of dubious risk...I conclude that no one knows what the hell they are talking about...as I mused about before we entered our initial lockdown, as it were, in my blog about life during war time, and the Talking Heads...and talking heads...we truly are at war...but without weapons...and with an invisible enemy...how quaint it was when our enemy was only terrorism...when our enemy were angry factions of starving nations who hated our excess...when life was stripping in airports...adjusting to code orange or red or whatever the fuck they called it that week...now we occasionally find solace in a governor who was hated weeks ago for a half-assed policy that left New York City streets brimming with crime...and now the streets are afloat with viral remnants...we look for hope in a little doctor's messages...he looks like that nice uncle that gave you a dollar at the seder...we crave hope...directions...levity...light...and then bury ourselves in distractions...hoarding...binging Netflix without chill...in need of that old school religion, we suffer without the benefit of dedicated clergy...they look at us with compassion through computer screens...our ears denied the solace of choir and community prayer...where does that leave us all as so many enter this holy week...I truly do not know...should we be anointing doorways with blood to protect us from plague?...and the irony...it's National Poetry Month...and with each new poem I read or write...I find myself returning to Eliot's "The Waste Land"...April is the cruelest month...