Dave Bonta's "Unforgetting" mixes prose with two short haiku-like verses, and its mood sits somewhere between loneliness and cautious hope. Judging by the opening line, the speaker is a year into the pandemic and wonders whether basic human habits, such as kissing, hugging, or standing in a crowd of strangers, have slipped away. The joke about forgetting "whole languages, one lonely drink at a time" is funny, but it carries real sadness.
The second half moves outdoors. The speaker walks a mountain ridge and surveys quarry, paper plant, railroad, and interstate, all of them ordinary, working things. Snow has retreated, but the bare ground offers "nothing new." Then the final image arrives: the speaker pausing to eat a handful of old snow. It feels like a small, stubborn act of staying present. The milkweed pod in the first verse works the same way, last year's growth still holding next year's promise. The poem doesn't promise a recovery, but it leaves room for one: "Not yet."