Sonnet to a Viral Spring
by Louise Cary Barden
These days will leave their mark one-hundred years from now:
this time of dark, even in the sun, when we know death
appears around the corner with a simple cough
before a flash of fever and a sudden loss of breath.
Some days we sit trembling at home, in isolation
without escape. We’re marked. Doctors say
we will fall victim to inevitable contagion
in a week, a month, maybe even later on today.
And yet the sun shines on as if this spring
were just like any other. How can we sit afraid
when willful daffodils all down the street cling
to long tradition, spreading cheer from yard to greening yard
and scarlet tulips shout into a bluing sky
to celebrate this life, this hour, without once asking why.
Originally published by Grassroots Books Corvallis, Poetry Month Selection, 2020
Butterfly Effect
by Louise Cary Barden
Next September, find a view above an Appalachian
gap – the place where a ridge of rolling mountain tops
declines into a break, hillsides dipping and rising
on either side of a narrow trail made by paws and moccasins
and boots. Stand in the cold before sunrise where,
in the shadow of those hills the leafy tops of oak
and poplar, ash and walnut in misty air below
seem feathered grey and beige. And wait.
Wait for the sun’s first gold to strike that canopy, transform
the mist into a thin vapor and warm the pale feathers
into orange opening wings, a hundred, then a thousand
glowing spots fanning out into an auburn blanket
over every branch above the dew-soaked slopes’ dark
green rhododendron tangles. Stand sun-struck
as those new-lit wings begin to rise in twos and threes, then more
and more bright sparks flickering into the blue
until they become silhouettes and gather
into a cloud that vanishes off into southern sky.
If a billion fewer Monarchs traverse the air’s
invisible road today than twenty years ago, what difference
can it make? Scientists say the flutter of just one butterfly’s wings
can change the weather days from now. They do not know
a way to calculate what that change will be
among the million possibilities; they call their study
chaos theory. While volcanic ash covers farms in the Pacific
and firestorms roar across the Australian Bush, those mathematicians
leave us here without a cause that can be named
to stand high on this ridge, transfixed by glowing flames
as they ascend into the sun.
Originally published in Kosmos Quarterly, Spring 2021