Covid-19: More poetry

My friend Lynn likes to listen to podcasts, while she exercises or gardens or plays solitaire. So does my sister-in-law Patty. Me, I only listen to podcasts while I cook—when I cook, which isn't all that often. It never occurs to me to . . . just listen to a podcast, simply because I can.

Today, though, I thought that might be a way of amusing myself without a lot of effort, since I'm finding it difficult to sit still and read lately. So I scanned the long list on my phone, and settled on Cheryl Strayed's Sugar Calling, a spinoff of her and Steve Almond's old New York Times column Dear Sugars, which I loved. In Sugar Calling, she speaks with literary luminaries. And she is a wonderful interviewer. Today, I listened to her converse with Alice Walker ("about ancestors, solitude, and the time it takes to heal") and Billy Collins ("about memorization, 'picture language,' and the power of collective silence"). What a treat!

Billy read a few poems, all of which relate to tragedy or hardship and our awareness or forgetting or never even knowing. I want to keep them handy, so I reproduce them here for your reading (and in the case of the first one, listening) pleasure.

First, his own poem "The Names," written in honor of 9/11 and originally read before a joint session of Congress held in New York on the first anniversary of the attack:

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A fine rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name—
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner—
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening—weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds—
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in green rows in a field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

Here he is reading it:

He then read a poem by Irish poet John O'Donnell, "When," which is about the Covid-19 crisis:

Becalmed Grafton Street in Dublin's
city center

And when this ends we will emerge, shyly
and then all at once, dazed, longhaired as we embrace
loved ones the shadow spared, and weep for those
it gathered in its shroud. A kind of rapture, this longed-for
laying on of hands, high cries as we nuzzle, leaning in
to kiss, and whisper that now things will be different,
although a time will come when we’ll forget
the curve’s approaching wave, the hiss and sigh
of ventilators, the crowded, makeshift morgues;
a time when we may even miss the old-world
arm’s-length courtesy, small kindnesses left on doorsteps,
the drifting, idle days, and nights when we flung open
all the windows to arias in the darkness, our voices
reaching out, holding each other till this passes.

And finally, "The End and the Beginning" by Wisława Szymborska (translated by Joanna Trzeciak), about the aftermath of World War II:

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monterey County stats are up to 317 infections (up 9 since yesterday, up 29 since Monday, when last I posted numbers); still—thankfully—only 6 deaths. People hereabouts are starting to moan about shelter-in-place orders. I see so much emotion, and those being emotional don't seem to appreciate science too very much. Me, I will continue to listen to the epidemiologists.

Stay safe. Remember that we are in a most unusual time. Be kind.