"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Thursday, April 23, 2020

Poems for a Nuclear Age of Pandemic


First Denial, Then Fear: Covid-19 Patients in Their Own Words | WIRED


In Pictures: Life in Wuhan, coronavirus epicentre | China | Al Jazeera




Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman
offers words of hope amid pandemic
April 17, 2020





Let's GoForth
by W.B. Yeats

“Let us go forth,
the tellers of tales,
and seize whatever prey
the heart longs for,
and have no fear.

Everything exists,
everything is true,
and the earth is only a
little dust under our feet.”

W.B. Yeats
The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
Jan 1, 1893














During difficult times…
by Elena Mikhalkova


“Grandma once gave me a tip:

During difficult times,
you move forward in small steps.

Do what you have to do,
but little by bit.

Don’t think about the future,
not even what might happen tomorrow.

Wash the dishes.
Take off the dust.

Write a letter.
Make some soup.

Do you see?
You are moving forward step by step.

Take a step and stop.
Get some rest.

Compliment yourself.
Take another step.

Then another one.
You won’t notice, but your steps will grow bigger and bigger.

And time will come when you can think
about the future without crying.

Good morning.”

Elena Mikhalkova
The Room of Ancient Keys





And the People Stayed Home
by Kitty O'Meara

And the people stayed home.

And read books,
and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art,
and played games,
and learned new ways of being,
and were still.

And listened more deeply.

Some meditated,
some prayed,
some danced,
some met their shadows,
And the people began
to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people,
living in ignorant,
dangerous,
mindless,
and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed,
And the people joined together again,

they grieved their losses,
and made new choices,
and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live
and healed the earth fully,
as they had been healed.

Kitty O’Meara



On the front lines fighting the coronavirus: Connecticut doctors ...


How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One
Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell
Other Press, October 19, 2010


“The effect, in Montaigne’s time as in our own, can be intoxicating. A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. 

Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.”
“So much have I made him my own,” wrote the twentieth-century novelist AndrĂ© Gide, “that it seems he is my very self.”
And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: “Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.”

The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. “Four hundred years disappear like smoke.”



NYC coronavirus: Mayor says shelter in place order could come ...


Tic Toc
by Tony Smith


93,047 words I’ve found of my writing. I still have 2014 thru 2019 to search. 11 years total of FB. I have more somewhere. A typical novel is 75,000 words. I swear I didn’t know I had this much. I’m a lazy writer. I do not write everyday. I’m discouraged that I won’t get it all together before my time on the boulder comes to an end. Discouraged there is so much more in my noggin’ I haven’t pulled out yet. Discouraged I am having trouble now remembering, finding the right word, even spelling. I’m afraid this is an effect of the tick fever or the onset of an elder mental disability. I never wanted to write as much as I do now. I never thought anyone else would like it enough to encourage me. I never tried to be published like I do now. Hoping for a name brand publisher instead of self publishing. But that takes a great deal of luck and time and I hear tic toc and see the leaves come and go. Tic toc like my heartbeat I heard in my ears as a child.

The man who edits for me is 73. His tic toc I wonder which of ours will stop first. If I’m lucky, I’m in the morning and I'll limp to the coffee pot. Take the 1st round of meds. I’ll start on desk chores I hate. I’ll hope I don’t hurt too much to perform outside tasks. I’ll find a way to sit at the keyboard after a story rushes through my brain and I can at least remember the motion of it, a smell, a noise, the trigger of it. I write a lot of humor but there is also pitch black and tears and screams and clawing in my head. I need to get that out too but watching your reaction is hard to do. The truth is hard to look at, it brings fear, regret, remorse and shame to me. The fear of no reaction is maybe worse.

There it goes again. While I am pecking with my thumb on the iPad qwerty with one eye open, the tic toc becoming bolder taking me to a tomorrow I hope. G'nite. I never am quite sure where I’ll go when I tap the keys.

Tony Smith
April 22, 2020




One World Street Art on Twitter: "... we love in trust. (Love is ...





I thought a song for sheltering in place might be Too Much Time On My Hands by Styx, but chose Chasing Cars as it speaks to being with someone you love and just forgetting about the troubles of the world. Weird video, but I like this song. - TJ

Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars (2007 version)





Courage
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Anne Sexton



Samuel Mang'era, Kenyatta University's Arboretum in Nairobi | PTP Studios

NPR logo

 Messages to the Coronavirus

by Eyder Peralta
International Correspondent, East Africa


"We also cannot afford to pay you too much attention" -
especially with a huge plague of locusts at hand.

- Samuel Mang'era

Dear Corona virus,

Welcome to Kenya. A few things you should know. Here we don't die of flu, don't be surprised if you fail to succeed. Usishangae [Don't be surprised], everything fails in Kenya. We are more likely to die of a cholera attack than to be killed by you. For us, every day is a run escape from death. We are the walking dead. Death is part of our lives the shadow that lingers over us from the time the umbilical cord is cut and buried behind the house to the time we fundraise for expensive arrangements to bury a no longer useful block of dead meat. Death can befall us anytime and we are not scared. It if comes, let it come. Why worry over what we can't control? Everything dies right? Even you corona will die!

Samuel Mang'era



Death and grieving around the coronavirus: People navigate ...




Poem by Crown Heights Jewish Teen Goes Viral





CP Gurnani on Twitter: "Who says top to down is the only way to ...




Grief
by Nancy Cross Dunham

what I'm learning about grief ...
is that it need not be
a heavy gray shawl
to wrap myself in,
clutching my arms tightly
across my chest

nor ...

need it be
a granite rock
that I should try
to push away

neither is it ...
... at least, no longer ...

a vast dark ocean
ready to pick me up
and slap me down
without warning

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that it is not me,
but that it offers
to become a friend

a friend ...

who will lightly lay a hand
on my shoulder
when tears come in the dark

a friend ...

who will laugh
out loud with me
at remembered silly moments

a friend ...

who can still hear
the music of our life

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that this friend
doesn't intend
to leave me

but promises
to hold my hand
to carry my memories

a friend ...

who will bear witness to my love
as I venture
toward the next day
and the following night

Nancy Cross Dunham



When Can America Reopen From Its Coronavirus Shutdown? - POLITICO



How two poems about the coronavirus went viral by addressing ...





“The Peace of Wild Things”

Listen,

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry



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