epiphany

Grief on a collective and historical scale, the song moves between a grandfather's experience at Guadalcanal and frontline medical workers during COVID. Grief as something structural and ongoing rather than personal: the poem asks how much loss a person can absorb before they break.

“Hold your hand through plastic now”

Constrained-holding register, the held hand mediated by the pandemic-PPE barrier; the gesture's persistence through the plastic makes the hand-hold the surviving form of contact when full touch is unavailable. The speaker stages the bare gesture as what remains when the body cannot be reached directly.