I am not afraid of Coronavirus half a world away
No disrespect to all affected
RIP to all who succumbed
But it's a half a world away

I am more afraid of the
Fear and the hatred
The systematic and institutional racism 
and the ever present glass ceiling 
that I face everyday

I am more afraid of 
a Senate that blatantly 
breaks the rules
I am more afraid of the 
white evangelicals who embrace 
the very opposite of all 
Christian beliefs

I am more afraid of the gun violence, 
the school shootings
of underemployment and overworking 
of employees
of climate change
...

Note: I was going through my writing notes and found this unfinished very rough poem that I wrote in mid-December 2019 when all we knew about Covid-19 at the time was a virus had broken out in China. I don’t even think it had a proper name then. It was just the novel Coronavirus then. Like most of us, I was way wrong about the virus, thinking it would be a local virus in China and not a worldwide pandemic, But this was back in December 2019. What is quite ironic though, for me, is , how stifled and chocked we were already feeling by the charged political landscape by the end of 2019; and how tragic the culmination of that super charged, over politicized (and dare I say it) radicalized landscape has been. Tuesday was deeply disturbing and saddening. Not sure where we go from here, how as a nation we recover.