Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering

into a starless space, not knowing what to do

except perhaps, wave. Our host asks each box:

What’s new with you? We talk, in turns.

We share the virtual part – meaning

the essence. It’s lovely. How this half-body

huddle forces us to talk; how we conform,

like grafted stalks, to a new light source.

Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal.

I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously.

No one can see me gazing at our years.

My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes

are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images,

expressions like true selves they made as toddlers.

On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats.

How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream.

No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers;

only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say,

more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever 

attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru 

caravans for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only 

to prove we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too.