thankful cont'd

 One of our regular volunteers (who come in when the library is not open to the public and take all appropriate safety precautions) said as she left on Monday "I am so thankful that you let me do this.  It gets me out of my house and I can do something useful in a friendly safe place."  Meanwhile we are so thankful for her.  It is a great help to have people in to do shelving and shelf reading.  It is, to quote a perhaps overused phrase, a "win-win."  Another of our lovely volunteers sent me the following book recommendation (I am also very thankful for these!), which included a very appropriate poem.  I will be purchasing the book for the collection, but offer you the below as a teaser.  We are thinking, by the way of starting to collect covid art work and writing to be displayed in our gallery.  Stay tuned.  Please be in touch if you have any of your own to share...

Cornelius Eady’s poem “Corona Diary” was written early in the story of 2020: in April, when Alice Quinn, editor of the collection Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, first put out a call to see what people were writing as we faced a spreading pandemic, new ways of living, and previously unfathomable rituals around illness and loss. Eady, the author of seven collections, is one of more than 100 American poets from across the nation, from every walk of life, who contributed to this book, delivering their heart’s news to us in a collective portrait of a challenging time—what Quinn calls “an unexpected bounty in a period when so much was uncertain and would remain that way for a long time to come.”

Corona Diary

These days, you want the poem to be A mask, soft veil between what floats Invisible, but known in the air. You’ve just read that there’s a singer You love who might be breathing their    last, And wish the poem could travel, Unintrusive, as poems do from The page to the brain, a fan’s medicine. Those of us who are lucky enough To stay indoors with a salary count the    days By press conference. For others, there is Always the dog and the park, the park And the dog. A relative calls; how you    doin’? (Are you a ghost?) The buds emerge, on    time, For their brief duty. The poem longs to    be a filter, but In floats Spring’s insistence. We wait.