Early Summer in PTown, June 2021
A crowded street teems with tourists
as Commercial Street lives up to its name.
This surely wasn’t the case in 2020,
when COVID-19 stole away the summer.
The idea of getting “back to normal”
has a certain appeal, but that can’t happen
unless more than a half million departed American souls
can also return to the ones that they left behind.
Since they’re still gone, we the living
Owe it to their memories to prevent
The idea of “normal” from ever becoming
more than an unreachable ideal.
We who survived that terrible period,
deadlier than any war in our history,
have flocked once again to our favorite places
to resume our old consumerist ways.
This will be a summer to make up for lost time,
as much as that could be accomplished,
unless the virus somehow comes back,
and then we’ll really be in trouble.
On the day this poem was written, there were 0 new cases of COVID reported in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, where Provincetown is located. It soon became painfully evident that COVID has not yet gone away, as so many of us had hoped it would.]
