In these end times,
The sky is grey above the empty churches and the silent cemeteries
with their forgotten gravestones waiting and waiting for something
to happen
The snow seems to linger on through the winter and into the spring
as the inhabitants of the townhouses watch their television sets
and the people walking their dogs in circles stare at their cellphones
and send text messages
The picture of the flower still hangs on the bedroom wall
The light from outside still falls through the window
on the other side of the exhibition hall
illuminating Rodin's statues and Rembrandt's portraits
in the empty art museum
There on the television set is a glimpse of the far off mountains
and the sound of a waterfall
The phone rings.
It is another robocall.
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Author Notes
In this part of the series, I wanted to articulate this sense of life struggling to reclaim something of its former grandeur, its former vitality, in the midst of the pandemic and the images I used here were of the emptiness of New York City at the height of it. The empty art museums, the empty churches, the gravestones waiting for redemption and resurrection, the winter snow on the edge of spring; these are all images of a world on the threshold of something, looking back and looking forward at the same time. And yet we are called back to that reality of despair by the incessant robocall. estory
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