Carol Ann Duffy’s WRITE Where We Are Now project is featuring new poems and new perspectives about the pandemic as we live through this challenging time. It is fantastic to have this record unfold day by day and I am very happy to have a poem posted that I wrote in early April when there was still blossom on the cherry tree. How things move apace as they say, and how they stay the same. The weirdness of Lockdown.
https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/write/framing-device-.php
FRAMING DEVICE
The glare from my computer screen
is a framing square of light,
while a streetlight highlights
orange smears on the window.
Below the apex of the eaves opposite,
the date, nineteen hundred and seven,
is at the same height as the cherry blossom.
How many times has it bloomed
and fallen since?
The Edward Hopper painting,
‘Sun in an Empty Room, 1963’,
is on my screen, painted fifty-six years
after my neighbour’s house was built.
Sunlight forms its own door
on the wall and a pale grid on the floor,
while outside the picture window,
leaves lean like a green wall.
It is spring two thousand and twenty
and various things are blooming.
LISA KELLY
Finchley, street view: 6 April 2020
Lisa Kelly 