It’s a Slog

No one can say that the COVID pandemic hasn’t impacted global culture, and poetry is no different than any other art form. Today’s poem was written in the midst of the pandemic years. It’s quite common for poems to be written in the deep of a situation and not revised or finished to a point where they come out to the public until later. Of course, timing is not standardized. Many poems are written well after a situation has passed by. Wordsworth famously wrote in the preface to the 1800 edition of his Lyrical Ballads that

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1800 edition,

Today’s poem wasn’t one of those. It was a little more in-the-middle of events.

It’s a Slog

a masked, distanced, why is there so much
mud no matter where I step
and I hope it’s just mud and not a bunch of dog—

or worse—

slog is the right word and at the same time
too short, too finite, too little to end anything,
as 2020 was too weak to end things,
all 2020 did was fizzle out into a corner, get drunk,
crawl into the past on its hands and knees
and hope to be forgotten
while we turned our own corners to uncover
another dirty icy mud-strewn field
and it’s pathetic path we trod, or rather,

slogged upon or through

dogged, shoulder to the millstone sort of thing,
that’s slog, right? that plus a certain swampy feeling
as if your boots’ll be sucked down into the infinite
mud any step now, because there’s always mud

always mud with slog

though on the other hand (foot?)
muddy slip-sliding undersells persistence,
maybe more than a bit,
and unfairly blames doggedness
without which—face it—
we wouldn’t have made it this far,
not from Egyptian pharaoh to whining modern royals,
not from yesterday to today,
not March to March

and anyway slog once meant

a hard strike with a fist or a stick,
a slug of sorts and not the gooey kind of slug, no,
slog is the kind of slug
that drops you on your damn ass
(in the mud)
and if you think I shouldn’t swear then
get out of the way of this stick
because we've been a year now on this slog

and we know how to use that jab

~~

A subversive little verse in that there is a lot of determination required to actually slog through something, and there’s this swirl of you, I, we undergirding the poem’s point of view. With of course the play on jab / slug and an allusion to vaccine jab.