stonepicnicking_okapi

For the next two days I am going to post poems from Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic edited by Alice Quinn, which I read cover to cover and finished yesterday.

And I decided to take a stab and writing my own pandemic poem. I am also posting a collage. Not much of a collage, in the little Bosch notebook, but it is more about preserving a few dried specimens of the flowers which are the subject of the poem. I glued a piece of transparent plastic over the flowers so they won't disintegrate. The grape hyacinth are and were found in a random tuft of grass around the apartment buildings and I remember it first being presented to my attention by Minsiculus when we were on one of our first pandemic walks around the buildings in spring of 2020.

My poem is a xenolith, my favourite modern poetic form. The long lines and the short lines are two separate poems and you fit them together like teeth of two combs.

How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry? by Julia Alvarez

Will the lines be six feet apart?
Will these hexameters be heroic like Homer’s?
(Will) (each) (word) (have) (to) (be) (masked) (?)
Will there be poetry insecurity?
Will there be enough poetry to go around?
Will poems be our preferred form of travel?
Will we undertake odysseys searching for Ithacas inside us?
Will poetry go viral?
Will its dis/ease infect us?
Will it help build up antibodies against indifference?
Will poems be the only safe spaces where we can gather together:
enter their immense silences
see snakes slithering inside sestinas,
listen to nightingales singing on the boughs of odes –
hark! a lark in the terza rima,
a hawk in a haiku?
What if only poetry will see us through?
What if this poem is the vaccine already working inside you?

Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry by Jericho Brown

I don’t know whose side you’re on,
But I am here for the people
Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning
And close down for deep cleaning at night
Right up the street and in cities I mispronounce,
In towns too tiny for my big black
Car to quit, and in every wide corner
Of Kansas where going to school means
At least one field trip
To a slaughterhouse. I want so little: another leather bound
Book, a gimlet with a lavender gin, bread
So good when I taste it I can tell you
How it’s made. I’d like us to rethink
What it is to be a nation. I’m in a mood about America
Today. I have PTSD
About the Lord. God save the people who work
In grocery stores. They know a bit of glamour
Is a lot of glamour. They know how much
It costs for the eldest of us to eat. Save
My loves and not my sentences. Before I see them,
I draw a mole near my left dimple,
Add flair to the smile they can’t see
Behind my mask. I grin or lie or maybe
I wear the mouth of a beast. I eat wild animals
While some of us grow up knowing
What gnocchi is. The people who work at the grocery don’t care.
They say, Thank you. They say, Sorry,
We don’t sell motor oil anymore with a grief so thick
You could touch it. Go on. Touch it.
It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands.
They have washed their hands for you.
And they take the bus home.

grape hyacinth by okapi

remember that spring when to all hives went all bees?
I remember these purple flowers
without knowing their worth, how circumstances would seize
grape hyacinth, they are what towers
above all, all normal things, the everyday sneeze
in memory consigned import
plump and clustered, scattered and short
found unexpectedly and of interest, that breeze
what created islands of all
must’ve carried seeds, let them fall
much discussed and debated, woes and cries and pleas,
as seasons changed, the raisin stems,
while everything changed, and changed, and changed, with ease,
rested in sight like shriveled gems
I’ve forgotten all but the hands which gave me these