Crocus, primroses,
in locked-down Square Léopold
Achille. The plague spring.

Rana sent me a photo
of police on Hamra Street

enforcing curfew.
The boy I watched on the
roof of the refugee

squat was locked down already,
daily, among washing lines.

– MH, 29 March 20200

Daily lines burgeon
on Louis Blanc pavements, each sprout
five feet from the next:

human unblossoms outside
baker-butcher-grocers’ doors.

One out for one in;
gloved, masked, sanitised before
and after each yield.

The pigeons strutting the same
sidewalks heed no distancing.

– 30 March 2020

“Distance between us …”
she wrote long ago, and then
made it permanent.

Charpentier, Vêpres à la Vierge
(while I’m doing the dishes)

on the comforting
old squat black CD player:
for a moment, there’s

connection, if only with
that perplexed self, desiring.

– MH, 30 March 2020

That desire for self
to be more, more than terra
firma for virus

settlements, begets fresh creeds.
Parisians grunt and wheeze praise

to Lord Jogging, while
roaming forlorn as our streets.
Romans hymn and drum

Volare from balconies.
Jack Bernhardt downs ten thousand,

yes, minutes of Bones –
libation of eyes and wits
to fair Agent Booth.

The right mantra for lúc lác
spurs my quest across the net.

– KN, 31 March 2020

Across the street, a
girl stands lengthily at the
window, smoking and

looking at empty sidewalks,
sun-soaked on April first.

I wished the tourists
would disappear. Now they’re gone.
Watch what you wish for!

In purdah, in quarantine,
I dice one more aubergine.

– MH, 1 April 2020

Aubergine, once more.
Braised, bartha-ed, basil-and-beef-
fried, in any form …

The thought invades aurous noons,
leaves sharp pugmarks on my dreams

these still-wintry nights.
Preschoolers play COVID-Age
tag in our courtyard:

not more than two at a time,
and “catch” with an out-flung glove.

– KN, 3 April 2020

We drove out to the
place they called Karantina
where crews of ships from

Europe once waited forty
days to be declared plague-free.

Desolate still, but
in a lonely high-rise, in
a vast gallery,

the ninety-year-old painter’s
new gouaches, texts, tapestries.

Afterward, a huge
Armenian lunch in Bourj
Hammoud with my two

young friends, nobody knowing
quarantine was just starting.

– MH, 3 April 2020

Bedlam just started
here, N writes from New Delhi’s
migrant worker camps.

How will they lockdown millions
who have neither doors nor roof?

Millions who must walk
many moons to reach a home
to self-isolate.

Prime Minister Modi bids
his nation to light candles.

President Macron,
meanwhile, warned us off facemasks
unless really ill.

Spring: the dearth, in my two lands,
of roses for all the graves.

– KN, 4 April 2020

Excerpted with permission from A Different Distance: A Renga, Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair, Context/Westland.