The Paddock Review

….

The Stories

 

In 1400, it was the plague.

she didn’t get lost in sickness

(fortunately) she was with 

her cousins & sisters. On the 

countryside away from Rome, 

telling a tale every night, 

keeping the living alive 

and entertaining what 

was still appalling in the city.

 

Next, she traveled to 2020

during the Pandemic

without a mask or gloves.

She got lost among the

hospital corridors & the

wall-to-wall patients on

stretchers, in beds, bursting

the sterile-seams of the 

white-washed walls.

 

In 2022, was she sleeping

In the bed? Was she reading

The Decameron by Boccaccio?

Or staring at a painting by

Waterhouse of the plague

of 1400? The ladies and men 

sitting outside playing a lute

or a horn and telling stories?

 

How strange, this 2024…

…How strange that she

and her husband have lived

through a flood, a fire, an

earthquake and the plague.

They have stories to tell.

 

This poem is from the chapbook Traveling by Ellen Rosenbloom (Finishing Line Press), and https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/traveling-by-ellen-rosenbloom/

Ellen Rosenbloom has an MFA from the New School in Poetry. She has a BS from Skidmore College in Fine Art. She lives with her favorite person, her husband Adam in New York City.