A Few Days after My First Vaccine

 Walking by the lake, I lose an earring

and don’t even notice it at first,

overwhelmed as I am

by the strangeness of everything.

Blocks later, my hand reaches up

to feel that slight absence in one ear.

So then I have to retrace

my steps, as they say to do,

past the guy jogging with his mask pulled down

and the hijab-wearing,

stroller-pushing young mother in stylish jeans

and the homeless man emerging from his tent

on the banks of our urban oasis

bearing a boom box on one shoulder.

And that’s where I spot it, lying on the sidewalk,

miraculously untrampled — small, precious

found thing, a turquoise oval

encircled with rows of beads,

given to me with love by someone

I haven’t hugged in more than a year.

Tiny rescue from the sea of loss,

just as we seem to have found

a raft to grab on to

in the wake of a shipwreck so vast

we cannot yet imagine the end of it.

 

Alison Luterman, The Sun Magazine October 2021