My name is Podrigotumma and I have asthma and these days I'm very aware of my breathing

and any possible compromise of my breathing and ways within which as a person with pretty

chronic asthma I need to be very attentive to my own lungs.

That's a small item for me I think of other people who have so many more reasons to be

anxious about their own health, anxious about their own exposure.

And poetry for me, poetry is a thing that helps me breathe.

There's space on the page for my own imagination to fill in the bits that I need and poetry

makes me slow down in my reading.

I never skim read a poem, I read it out loud to myself and it slows my heart down, it

slows my breathing down and it helps my lungs to fill.

Leaving Early by Lian O'Sullivan

My love, tonight, Fenula is your nurse.

Will hear her voice sing song around the ward, lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness.

I heard that in another life she too journeyed through a storm, a kind of curse with the

ocean rising darkly around her, fierce with cold and no resting place, only the frozen

rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders, and no cure there but to wait it

out.

If, while I'm gone, your fever comes down, if the small salt-laden shapes of our song

appear to you as a first glimmer of earthlight, follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing.

She will keep you safe beneath her wing.

I encountered this poem because I was looking for some poems that would be appropriate for

thinking about the crisis of COVID-19 that's global and pandemic right now.

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