Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in
this petty pace, day to day,
The hours
are upon me, quite unapologetically,
Not
giving me a chance to even whisper
A
gratitude for the sufficiency of devices available
For my
students and me to carry on,
Pretty
unscathed, through lockdown lethargies,
Our
interactions of learning and teaching.
And so,
as one online class moves on into another,
As days
become nights and nights become days,
As time
is measured by the digital clock on the screen,
As sound
is now a faint unpleasant hum
In
plugged ears,
And sleep seeps in when
the luminance that glares into eyes"
Eventually,
everyday dims to darkness,
I grapple
with time—
Time—when
my hands can feel life and better things
Than the
qwerty;
Time—when
my eyes can look upon the brightness
Of a
sunlit morn or a moonlit night;
Time—when
my ears brim with real music;
Time—when
I can un-quarantine myself
Away from
my desk upon which sits,
In a box,
my classes of eight, nine, and ten,
And
experience the freedom of lockdown.
(The opening
lines, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow /
Creeps in
this petty pace, day to day" are from the famous soliloquy in
Shakespeare's Macbeth.)