Days of lockdown have only heightened our awareness of others on the limited occasions when we have been beyond our front door. We have become fine-tuned to others’ proximity and behaviour as we practise social distancing – from the avoidance of eye-contact to the edgy camaraderie and choreography of passing an approaching stranger. 

Small Kindnesses pays attention to actions that cost very little but can oil our day with grace. Such kindnesses form brief moments of connection. Perhaps there are things here we do almost unconsciously, or receive without registering.  

You resonate with some of poet’s observations, or have your own particular experiences to add. If you wrote the poet’s opening lines ‘I’ve been thinking about the way…’ what would come next in your version? 

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

Danusha Laméris