PANDEMIC POEMS: FIRST WAVE Olive Senior: These poems were written between May and September - the Covid-19 summer of 2020. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending at the period. I am interested in memorializing the historic moment we are living through, with capturing the zeitgeist, literally 'the spirit of the time'. S FOR SOCIAL DISTANCING What if you wanted to keep me at arm's length anyway? D for Domestic Violence As if the sickness outside has entered here: the fear, the choking, the gasping for breath. But no, that one is silent and invisible, named, with an exit strategy. For this one the 'shadow pandemic' there is only the uncertainty, the battering, the shivering, the fear, the choking, the gasping, for breath. And this blocked exit. A FOR ADJUSTMENT Refugees do it every day Slip into the unknown alone, maybe, withstand what we will never know heading for the Promised Land. And we who live in the Promised Land now have a taste of it. Not o