Marjorie Moorhead
From AIDS to COVID
In the eighties, we met. We loved.
Before the nineties, you were gone.
Didn’t get to live into your forties.
And I knew, from my late twenties on,
I’d be living with, and likely dying
from the AIDS virus too.
Though this fate would own me,
turns out I was luckier than you.
Meds improved. T-cells could climb
into the hundreds (seven was my low).
Full of pharmaceuticals and their sculpting,
experiencing the valleys of alienation,
still holding your drawings, paintings,
and the memories…
I’ve now made it through all of my fifties.
I’ve a husband, children, house with apple tree
and view of a river…life flows on.
But, facing this new virus, COVID,
there’s some PTSD. Memory of the pain
all those years ago; fears and battles
first faced by you, then me.
Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Tiny Seed Literary, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring; Granite State Pandemic Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2020, Alexandria Peary, ed.). Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.
SUBMIT to HIV Here & Now via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem, consider making a donation to HIV Here & Now, a project of Indolent Arts Foundation and Indolent Books.
