Social distancing is here to stay
SOCIAL distancing,
A word reverberating in my head, Has infiltrated our lives, During this despicable pandemic. Mongolia or Chicago?
It does not matter,
It’s everybody’s lingo today. Sans translation.
A phrase that’s here to stay.
The modern day plague, this is. Don’t blame us if we are paranoid Forewarned we were,
By a whistleblower – a doctor in Wuhan, Beware the coronavirus!
Sadly, he now lives six feet below.
Who needs a tsunami?
Covid-19 has turned our world turned upside-down.
Usurped spaces,
Crushed breaths,
Empty pockets,
Bankrupt nations ...
The Catacombs in Paris with six million skulls is horrific enough,
Forgive me if I have nightmares of the holocaust too.
So what is social distancing?
Just space,
A meter and a half is best, say the experts, The more the better.
If not the virus, so spiky,
Will surely lompat
And choke you to death,
Unless you scream for a ventilator. China-made or locally designed,
As long as it lasts.
This cursed virus prefers the old and the bent – easy targets.
For their lungs are spent, and their hearts So exhausted ... might just go kaput without any effort.
Who cares, if Ah Tok, Dida or Tata dies? A liability to the economy they are, anyway? When Social Welfare has to pay them, A hefty two hundred and fifty Ringgit a month,
To maintain their life – some life!
By the way, that’s only for the OKU (the disabled),
Minta maaf!
Guna lah social distancing,
I heard the nurses scream recently, Shooing people huddled together in the university clinic,
Desperate voices in a panic-stricken state, Forgetting that it’s a tad too late.
Put on a mask too, they implore!
Who can tell?
When the virus bludgeons and has a feast. Your coffin, will only have a number. Oh! How frightening!
Social distancing.
Why? Ask some morons,
Who think their prayers and ablutions Will rid the world of all this dastardly virus. Alas, many still die like flies,
For the virus loves clusters,
Like locusts, they swoop down and spread like wild fire.
... and God, the Seer of all, says,
I, the omnipotent and the omniscient, insist It’s either social distancing or Me,
You choose,
Your fate is in your hands. Remember, I gave you brains – a lot of it as a boon,
Silly fools!
Yet, dead bodies piled on one another in overcrowded morgues,
Confirm that’s the only time when social distancing is dead.
Friends and family, victims too, often sweating it out in quarantine,
Unable to attend funerals,
Shed tears and cry in vain.
Others, lighting joss sticks and burning incense at home,
Reciting holy verses to appease the dead, And silently praying for the bloody virus to die instead.
Thank God for technology these days! Virtual funerals on Teams and Zoom keep the mourners engaged. Thumping their chests and wiping their tears, heartbreaks that will last forever. Webinars they engage in too, with some priests, but surely not with the dead! Many a bride and groom have postponed their weddings too,
Afraid that garlands of viruses they might wear instead of flowers,
And land up far away from their honeymoon beds.
So what’s in store after the pandemic, I ask my astrologer?
A new phrase will be born, he predicts, with a whisk of his magic wand.
Social distancing, it will be, for language is surely evolving,
Take heed Oxford Dictionary and linguists, Not forgetting Chomsky ... (this is an aside, by the way).
Let’s clear the scourge of this harbinger of death and sing
Salam social distancing ... my friend.