[caption id="attachment_69225" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Bengt Ekeroth and Max von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Image courtesy Wikimedia Foundation.[/caption]
A Saturday morning in March
All is quiet
Except for a few cars on the street
And the occasional person
Head held low against a blustery wind
Just the eerie sound of a dog barking
In the distance
The new normal
In my mind’s eye I create a virtual library
Of movies, books, and songs
The Plague
The Seventh Seal
Life during Wartime
Not to ignore the crisis but as a reminder.
It has happened before and it will happen
Again. And yet here we all are.
I look at the cover of the current New Yorker
The ball of red spikes
A single human figure stuck in the middle.
How can something so lovely be so dangerous?
June Sawyers has published more than 25 books. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New City, San Francisco Chronicle, and Stagebill. She teaches at the Newberry Library and is the founder of the arts group, the Phantom Collective.