The wall along the South Bank bursts with shining
red hearts, all the way from Westminster Bridge
to Lambeth. Why valentines in July? we wonder,
push on to the Florence Nightingale Museum.
Inside the low-slung building, Nightingale’s fastidious
records, her mastery of statistics, line graphs
of injuries, dysentery, cholera, typhus. Scatter plots
wielded like weapons, to tout antiseptics, make others
see what she saw, bacteria and virus rupturing
soldiers’ lives like artillery. Beside the ticket desk
we exit into afternoon drizzle. Threading through
streets, markets, the gardens of St. Thomas Hospital,
past smokers in wheelchairs, revolving fountain, 
dahlia, delphinium, we hurry for a close-up of the wall.
There, across from Parliament, there, in Big Ben’s
sightlines, it curves out of view, every inch laden
with hearts except for a bronze plaque: The National 
Covid Memorial Wall. 228,000 small markers
in concrete. Down the sidewalk a young woman
extends her hand above her head, scrawls with a black
Sharpie. Endless epitaphs, names—and the mourners,
still here, on this path, facing the structure, bearing
paint, brushes, shaping hearts like upside down tears, 
joined at the base. Some looped with string, clustered
like balloons, bright sacs of breath knotted tight,
as if love could loosen its clutch, this vibrant
sorrow could fade into London’s heavy air.