Page 54 - My Creative Writing Portfolio

54

COVID-19 AND REMEMBERED CULTURE

Contradictory trend,
Lackadaisical life of lockdown
Slowed social world
Fast spreading Covid.

Fast life of Sydney - a global metropolis
Halting standstill
Invisible tiny force winning over mighty people
Telling them that they far exceeded the legacy –
Of wandering of their hunter-gatherer ancestry.

I, a speck, in this familiar but still alien city
Feeling alone even in the crowd
Aloneness giving anxiety as well as tranquillity
Telling me the crude reality.

Globalization wind brought me here
Away from my own place
Where my mind and cultural rhythms were in sync
Where social odour would foretell rituals
Or, that I could not make new place my place
The dilemma of rootlessness
My mind not yet sync with the place

In an alien city, my mind haunts the past
Stored in memories
That blurs my geographical and cultural spaces
Not being able to sync both
Paradox of mobility and rootlessness.

Covid has come to tell us that we have become rootless
That we should become like a tree
By developing roots in our place
By giving to the place
Something back
to the place that holds us.

22 August 2021, Greenacre, Sydney

About this poem:

Covid-19 lockdown had changed my daily pattern in Sydney, where I came about two months ago
to work in a college. Now, the college has shut down and I do not go to office. I have now followed
a routine pattern - wake up roughly about 6.30 am, take a shower, make coffee, read news while