My last post, My Apolitical Take on Masking, went over like a lead balloon with my readers. Okay, I get that. I’m neither a health and science writer nor a political writer, so that was a bit of a curveball. Fair enough.

These have been most unusual times for many of us, in so many ways. I have close friends who are not yet able to articulate their fears about what has been going on in their lives. I am sympathetic to them because I have things going on in my own life that I don’t talk about, either. Moreover, circumstances are such that I have a deal of free, solitary, discretionary time, during my evenings and weekends, that I assure you, I never wanted to have. But I have it. So I did what any writer would do… er. well, almost.

I’ve been taking a poetry class. Not so that I could begin spewing out love sonnets — although that would be something — but because I wanted to push my boundaries further with regard to the way I use words to convey not just thoughts and ideas but also emotions and sensory experiences. Poetry.

The course I’m taking recently had a session on metaphor and included a writing prompt on crafting a conceit, where the entire poem becomes an extended metaphor. My readers can breathe easy because I didn’t write a poem about masking. No, I wrote something I called The Ride. It did okay in peer review, so I thought I’d share it here.