There will come a time when this virus is gone, managed, part of our recent history. We will emerge from our houses and flats and blink in new light.

What world will we make? What will we have learned during our enforced furlough from the way things used to be? Do we want things to go back to how they were?

Do we still think that it is not possible to make radical political and economic changes in the face of a major crisis (such as a climate emergency for example)?

Do we still think that an economy whose survival is based on increasing GDP year on year into infinity is every going to be sustainable?

Do we think that inequality and poverty are prices worth paying to sustain our own small kingdoms or can we do better than this?

We need new thinking, new leadership.

Perhaps this might help;

Every Easter I try to write a poem that gathers together something of where we are. This Easter I am fortunate to be spending with my wife, my kids and Emily’s boyfriend. The sun is shining and the garden is blooming. Meanwhile in the real world, others are locked in tiny flats, lonely and with little to eat, stopped from even visiting their local parks.

What does Easter mean in this context?

I care not for your carefully crafted theories of atonement

Or the chocolate eggs you hid inside my hedge

Make it myth or firmest fact, or just

Some old and cold convention

Don old bonnets or blue bunny suits

Cantata or carouse it

But me, I search the sky for hope

I long for resurrection

.

I long for greens at the tips of trees

For stirrings deep in soil

For a pulse aflutter under brand-new skin

Marking an end of unpotential, when

Spring is carried in on warming winds

Letting souls unfold, like leaves

Like lengthening days, reaching out

For resurrection

.

Roll away the stone

For behold, all things are made again, and

We all need second chances

After silence comes the song

Comes the knowing right from wrong

And the grace to make things better

Let us make messiah from our mud and blood

And practice resurrection