Muffled Apocalypse Sounds, by Chantal Lunardi

By Chantal Lunardi

A poetic reflection on writing in the time of COVID :

Time I have
Creativity space equanimity?
Unfruitful solitude
unceasing cerebral racket
contaminated possibly contagious.
Not a cohesive word
down on paper
or up on the screen.

Maybe if I wait
alone safe and kind
smiling perking
washing my hands

maybe

This alienating distance
I am not designed for
neither is the viability
of going back to the incongruity
of infinite impossibilities.

I can’t.

I was not designed for this world neither

Paradises
Walled gardens
Gate communities.
How grateful we are
to live here and not there.

But the wind tells
and the rain cries
while the dark sky tries
to hide what’s over the mountains

Muffled Apocalypse Sounds

Mixed feelings after a safe-semi-private session at the Kootenay Sound Healing Centre

We bathe in gongs
and thieves oil aromatherapy.
Hearts and windows wide open
dispelling our illusions of immunity.

And the gongs went on
with tinkles and chimes
and other cosmic sounds.

Everyone looking not too well
looking better than how I feel
looking better after the bells.

We breathe beauty
health and the divinity
of what could be.  

My heart attunes with the gongs
painfully echoing the wails

muffled over the fence.
I hear the Minaret calls
prayers mixing with Native Chants
Ayahusca wind whisperers
parents humming to children
random foreign voices
probing for the divine notes
of a collective harmony.

About the Author

Chantal Lunardi is born in Quebec, Canada, from a Polish-Italian-French immigrant family. She moved to British Columbia, Canada, after her Master in Anthropology at Laval University to pursue her studies in Cognitive Sciences. Her multidisciplinary PhD at Simon Fraser University, bursting with creativity, could never be wrapped up. After many years of academic life and executive/administrative functions in the education and non-profit worlds, she established her residence in the Kootenays (British Columbia) to focus on the field part of her passions: mingling with the most interesting people in the world as an Education Assistant and Support Worker; and since she can hardly help it, writing.

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