They sailed away, for a year and a day...

Hello from the center of the pandemic.

I started reading and writing poetry when I was a kid. My mother used to read me “The Owl and the Pussycat,” a sweet nonsense fantasy where animals go off on adventures and fall in love. I think this may have ignited my lust for travel.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

It’s been a while since I last wrote. Grief and pandemics are funny bedfellows, actually more natural together than I would have thought. I find myself surrounded by the language of loss, both framed by physical loss throughout my collection of friends and community and metaphorical loss of our old way of living, of being. A new world order yet to be built. In the midst of that heaviness, I haven’t been sure what to say and for a while actually convinced myself I was *winning* the process of mourning. I have so much more to learn. 

Keeping busy sometimes helps. Weekdays are spent working in our second bedroom, but I sandwich the 10 to 6 with writing and enough Zooms to fill a lifetime. I’ve always been an overbooker, saying yes to too many events in one night and rushing all over town to make it to each for a hello, hug and promise we will get together soon before dashing off to the next event. The virtual world makes haste of commuting and allows me to go from social media training, poetry reading and yoga/meditation within the span of a few hours. When the weekend comes, I am hungry for unstructured and languorous hours at my desk or kitchen table, where I write you this short note.

I’ve found poetry comes to me easily these days, pouring out since January and it won’t stop. Mixed in with the heaviness and depth of feeling is a gratitude for a reunion of sorts with my heart. I have not shared a personal poem in years. When I chose a masters in journalism over poetry, I exiled my poems to scrap pages of my notebook. It’s taken me 15 years to fully embrace it again and I am grateful I’ve allowed them to return. 

Here’s one I wrote last week.

“If”

Nature is all around me

even when I am surrounded

by cityscape and the drumming 

of the bedrock-exploding machine 

they’re using down the block

to excavate my city. 

Pause. Wait for the signs 

to present themselves

to greedy eyes, mouth and gut.

Ripped apart and raw:

Here is New York. 

With the birds comes the rattle 

of the jackhammer, the hum

of the 1 train in the distance, 

the beating of my heart 

like coins rattling in a tin cup 

thrust forward with a hungry stare.

Ride those rails to salvation.

If you can make it here, 

you can make it anywhere. That if, 

the cliffhanger of your life.

I know I am not alone in reaching for poetry to make sense of this moment. My Instagram feed is filled with poetry. The words often come from unexpected sources: the design blogger, the artisanal soap maker upstate, the humorless journalist I follow because I always thought there was something deeper in her that just needed to be unleashed. Even the doughnut shop around my corner posted a poetic sign announcing its closing for the Great Pause, aka the “stay at home order.” Many of these signs are found poetry. We are all longing for connection and it’s as if we can only say this in snippets, metaphor, quotes and hints of ideas, perhaps because we fear saying it outright:

I miss you and I love you and life would be nothing without each and every one of your stories and smiles and peculiar ways of being. Take my hand, and:

Let’s dance by the light of the moon. 

The moon,

The moon, 

Let’s dance by the light of the moon.