From a Diary of the Plague Year (6)

The plague has us hunkered,
crouched socially behind boundaries.
The Scots started using hunker
as a verb sometime after 1700.
They may have grabbed it from
a stash of Norse words hidden
in on a heath somewhere. Hunker,

a swift ax blow of a word,
splits the syllables of
"observe social distancing"
and turns them into kindling.

Useful when, in your exhaustion
from holing up in your worry-den,
you can manage only a few
morphemes of talk or test:
"We're hunkered down. Love, Us."


hans ostrom 2020