Dave Bonta's "Pandemic Time" begins with a couple who can't be in the same place. The speaker is in the mountains of Pennsylvania and his wife is in London, and they meet each day through a screen. Two small scenes follow, one frightening and one almost comic, and each ends in a haiku. Together they ask what it means to stay close when closeness has become a risk.
The form is the first thing to notice. Prose paragraphs with haiku set between them make up a haibun, a mixed form. Nothing rhymes, and the haiku don't keep a strict syllable count. "Pandemic time" is short, "stopping the car to watch" stretches out, and "a pair of ducks" closes the line quickly. The prose has a different rhythm. The first paragraph runs in long, breathless sentences, like someone retelling a shock. The second ends on a deliberately flat line: "That was really great, she says." After all the noise, this plain sentence is the emotional centre of the poem.
The first scene is about fear. A man spits at the wife, then at a bystander, then at a runner, "fortunately also missing both." The repeated near-misses make the episode feel like luck rather than safety. The phrase "the mad plague carrier" appears in quotation marks, and the speaker compares the man to "some urban legend." That distance matters. The speaker hears the story secondhand through a screen, so it has already begun turning into folklore. His reaction is bodily and quietly ironic: "I'm still digesting this news." Spit is a threat from the mouth, and news that has to be digested is the speaker's own slower response to it.
The haiku that follows doesn't comment on the story. It simply changes the scene: "stopping the car to watch / a pair of ducks." This is where the haibun form does its work, because the reader has to decide how the two parts connect. A stopped car suggests that the news has made the speaker pause. A pair of ducks, two creatures together, quietly contrasts with the couple on separate continents. The poem never says so, and its restraint makes the image more affecting.
The second scene reverses the first. Strangers once again come close to one another, but now they do it with applause instead of spit. The wife "carries me outside," a phrase that makes the speaker passive and portable, like a phone or a child. He watches "from atop a rubbish bin," which is a funny and humble place from which to witness a moment of public solidarity. The clapping for NHS health care workers is "chaotic, unsyncopated, and over in less than a minute." The word "unsyncopated" is a slightly odd choice. In music, syncopation means off-beat accents, so the word literally describes something regular. I read it as the speaker reaching for "unsynchronised," which fits a crowd clapping out of time and perhaps a lagging video link too. Either way, the ritual is messy and brief, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise. Its value lies in the wife's simple verdict.
The final haiku turns an everyday phrase around: "open road / our distances / are social." We usually say "social distancing," where distance is something we do to each other. Here the order flips, and distance becomes something the couple share and something that is itself social. "Open road" works in two ways. It evokes the empty roads of lockdown, but it also suggests freedom and a route that still connects the two of them. The mountains and London are far apart, yet the road is not closed.
Part of what makes the poem significant is how modestly it handles a huge subject. It has no statistics and no grand statements about illness. It gives us a single day's news, a bin, a screen and a minute of clapping, and it trusts those details to carry the feeling. It also captures a contradiction of the pandemic: other bodies could be dangerous, yet people still needed one another. The spitting man and the clapping neighbours are both part of that picture. By the end, the poem has found a hopeful reading of the word "distance" without ignoring the fear.