A Poem a Day (592): The drill

 
The drill
 
Morning-in-method wakes,
a celebratory feel. An upstage.
Darts in the 20 zone, flights up.
 
This is the slide into Easter’s tower,
padlocked doors and silenced rooms,
all eyes on a fabricated world
beyond the living and the doing.
 
The drill.
The orator reads from a list of
unspeakable words to an invisible audience.
 
Bathe with a missing curtain, your
privacy a luxury you can no longer have.
 
Underwater, limbs move slow,
one stroke forward, two pumps back,
circle inside the dead-pool current,
ebb and flow impossibly futile.
 
Pink conch curves. Empty shells.
This sea falls voiceless if you hold them
to your ear.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 9, 2023