Wednesday, March

Theadora Siranian:
I wrote “Wednesday, March” in April, for a National Poetry Month group project where we each wrote a poem a day. I debated the blandness of the title, but decided it represents the temporal vagueness of quarantine experience. Lockdown of the city of Astana, Kazakhstan, where I currently live, began on March 19th, and I’d been staring out at the static, almost alienating steppe from my apartment for a month. During this period, I’d begun to resent the very thing I’d loved so much when I’d first arrived in this place—the vast, endless sky.

Yes, this poem is about space, but also this poem is about time, and our short little memories, and our lack of patience, and the sorts of cognitive dissonance we can so easily fall prey to and engage in. It was a warning to myself: be aware that people all over the world, in places like China, Italy, and New York City, have been in lockdown for longer, and are in crisis in ways you fortunately cannot understand first-hand. Hold fast.

I find it eerie to read this poem now—at the end of July, as Kazakhstan sits in its second country-wide lockdown and the number of infections across the globe continues to grow—when people everywhere have become clearly fatigued with the pandemic, and as a result, some are becoming less vigilant. Patience, people; patience, self.