Myth Times by John Adams

John Adams is the author of two poetry collections: Briefcase (AUP, 2011; winner of the Jessie Mackay Prize) and Rumpelstiltskin Blues (Steele Roberts, 2017). He is also the author of the Elbow Stories (Steele Roberts, 2013), a collection of short stories. John has MCW and PhD degrees from Auckland University. His doctoral thesis explored novel performative grammars in the experimental feminine poetry of Joan Retallack. John has been a Family Court Judge since 1995.
 
Walking across the rural Cotswolds via one step-back-in-time pub to another; re-discovering London aided by the fresh company of twelve-year-old twin nieces; visiting San Sebastien with an adult niece from Dublin – these recent pleasures seemed easily repeatable. Only months later, expectations adjusted for Covid-19.

The first lockdown proved to be silver-lined because we moved into our son’s home in Tauranga. He was an essential worker, and they needed help with a new-born child along with two other youngsters. Silver? Golden-lined, as it turned out. Nevertheless, I was aware how much had changed and, like other writers, I mused on those changes, grasping for shapes that might translate my disturbed imagination. Words help. Old words, flickers of laughter and wisdom.

At a serendipitous point, I noted that Covid rhymes with “Ovid,” author of the famous Metamorphoses. Rhyme operates like alignment of lenses, focusing and magnifying. Myth times situates us amid pestilence, gods, underworlds, and giants. The poem leads to narrative: What should we tell those who follow about these times?

Myth times had a couple of working titles during its gestation. Earlier, I’d called it: Alterations to suit, perhaps more playful than Myth times but I chose to demystify the title. I wanted to acknowledge that we’d been warned but hadn’t picked up the signals; that Ovid, and lessons from the Black Death or the 1918 Influenza, gave us hints that we’d overlooked.
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My poem offers no magic answer. Despite the pretentious imagery (I blame Ovid), it tries not to preach. Each successive edit pruned excess words, bringing the poem closer to something that might be called poetry. Like a report from a submarine with many constricted portholes, this poem records one of my views of Covid-19’s murk.
 
Myth times
 
In those strange times, so much changed:
the simple act of handwashing
became ritual, we chose bubbles over froth.
Sacrifices were called for:
our doors un-knocked, neighbours distanced,
missing those we loved.
 
Great gods of the sky were brought down;
a clearing was observed in the air;
our putrid waters
purified; grumbling
giants were subdued and bound;
economies, forced to tune anew.
 
Ovid’s underworld visited our global neighbours –
tales of countless deaths were brought home
while the pestilence festered, invisible,
off-shore. Bears stood
sentinel in domestic windows
to bolster community heart.
 
Despite myth-heralded warnings,
when they came, these changes seemed unnatural,
echoes emanating from the foggy realm
of prophesy. Let us therefore collect
these chronicles, hold these memories
for posterity: Covid’s Metamorphoses.
 
John Adams