One of the oldest forms of self-expression, poetry can serve as a linguistic tool for current event commentary. In Professor Peter Balakian’s spring Poetry Writing Workshop, students felt compelled to write about the pandemic in the final weeks of the semester.
“They wanted to use lyric and compressed language to capture some of the intensity and depth of this moment,” Balakian says. “Poems do witness the complexity of life, and that’s why we need them in the larger civic space of our society.”
Here is a selection of poems from the class:
We Never Listened to the Birds Before
Madison Heggins ’20
We never listened to the birds before,
now small wings turn wicked beats.
Lone sound from a white chested, black-bowed
bird. The dog trying to catch it in its mouth
It presses its talons into hard ridges
of sloped roof. Another call.
We never listened to the cars before.
Rubber on wet concrete. Billie Jean through a cracked window.
We miss the hostility of car horns. The old man always
smoking in front of the station. The garbage man slams a plastic bin
in the alley. One less man than usual. The loud engine
used to signal pajamas, slippers, head scarves, a week’s
trash in rushed hands. Everyone having forgotten the day
that’s remained the same for years. Now everything forgotten is done.
We never listened to the wind before.
One powerful gust smelling of bleach and desperate bread.
Carrying sounds: slap of disinfectant on somebody’s pruned hands,
children next door, who have not left their home in two weeks.
Wind chimes from down the street muffling breathing,
a blown trash bag landing on undisturbed grass.
We never listened to the rain before.
Race the droplets creeping down the damp wood of the old fence,
drowning the croaks of the little beetles that live there. Smell
the storm, hear the old tree slapping its wet limbs against the second floor window.
The sounds of a dog’s paws scrambling against wet earth into a dry home.
Something new in the routine. Old too. Dip a pinky into a puddle,
press it to the brick of the home, watch the water wash into the cracks,
the concrete as old as the youngest daughter inside.
Sand, Colorado
Tristan Niskanen ’20
The Corona sign’s turned off —
Chicken Ricky’s closed.
Los Cabos across the street
has to go margaritas to stay alive.
Discos dead but Bee Gees revived.
Chalk & hopscotch,
bathtub gin during the pathogen.
Then watch news, boozed.
Decant it then chant it.
By sun & Sopris,
thinking this the place to be,
haikus near HighQ.
Another scribbler about the virus.
At least can place myself better
here than if I were writing about
the Sand Creek Massacre.
Both kill & are in Colorado
but we can wear masks & stay inside.
We don’t have to fear the army or
Chivington skinning Arapaho & Cheyenne.
When I fear the cough & fever
I never have to worry it’s small
pox. But I do worry about death
when massacres & pandemics hit.
Soon it’ll be over, they say,
we’re in this together, but when’s
the next Colorado War or state
lockdown. Sun goes down on
Aspen spring. Trees bud. Ginsberg
America. Poems are a peculiar tonic.
Words are one remedy. I know you
would like to know the panacea.
Dead Zone
Jessica Cho ’20
Purple perennials and chickweed over green hilltop.
Blue light from the display screens of computers and smartphones.
The calm that takes over during a silent exchange with the eyes.
The surge of anxiety from a momentary pause when a web page refuses to load.
A silk hand, warm, that reaches out to tenderly hold yours.
A like or a heart pinned to your post, the modern sign of validation.
Nervous, cracked voice, the courage to utter one’s name for the first time.
A careless swipe across a phone screen, contemplating attractiveness.
Energizing conversation, laughter, tears, the lively passing of time.
Shutting the door to watch yet another episode of your most recent binge.
Children whispering the secret password before entering the treehouse.
Children nagging parents and friends for the password to the Wifi.
Sandy rough edges, pages of a book held between fingertips.
“404 Page Not Found”; the server fails to serve you.
A stranger’s voice giving directions down the sweet vernal grass lined road.
The robotic inflections of a recalculating navigation system.
The giddiness of seeing a handwritten note on the countertop, for you.
A message worth pacing by the mailbox for.
Neighbors out on porches agreeing how pretty the hydrangeas look.
The Japanese Maple has never seen itself, humbly accepts compliments.
We no longer celebrate in the quest for answers.
What for, when we have search engines?
AIDS, Cholera, the Black Death — we have seen.
Walk invincible toward invisible malware viruses.
Pace calmly through the dead zones.
COVID-19 Musings
Brynn April ’20
I turned on the metal hand mixer
in the world of black and white
ink, unleashed torrents of words
baked into articles and speeches
smeared across television screens.
They call me “the invisible enemy” —
I hear it echoing across chartreuse
wallpaper kitchens, words flashing red
like the blood that roars in my ears,
a river surging between banks of skin
while the edges of my RNA, frayed
electrical wires, call for the source
of power that fuels my replication.
Its surge creates my race of clones
trying their new legs and spreading
across landscapes of air and breath:
fevers under weighted den blankets,
sighs before buzzing Apple office desktops,
coughs stifled in puffy playground coats.
They cause the pinwheel of screams
that progresses in instants of frozen time —
raindrops pounding on emptied streets,
wooden chairs piled behind restaurants,
neon red “OPEN” signs switched off.
Oh, to have sold-out baseball stadiums,
and limbs under pulsing club lights,
laughter over warm-plated filet mignons
as “hello”s float in and out of being —
the human pleasantries that fuel me —
now replaced by their masked mouths,
Lysol cans and hoarded toilet paper.
Participation Points
Lizzie Svach ’22
The squirrels are eating the tulip heads again,
again I am the bitter person this town produced.
Stuck in the same state I left at 18
it is hard to feel the earth’s rebirth.
My half uncle lost his full mother.
The funeral was on facebook live,
just like my 11 year old cousin’s girl scout sing along.
People want to know if was the virus.
So sad, let it at least be exciting,
maybe they can say they are apart of this.
They might know someone
who lost to the headline of a newspaper.
I will shake the hand of each spring breaker
if it means another second they are still.
My family watches the news praising the essential,
the ones society feels fine putting on the front lines.
While people wait in their homes,
antsy to help or quiet their guilt,
listing the ones who have it hardest,
like a flimsy memorial for those already counted as dead.
This pity isn’t sympathy its a hierarchy,
and you stand on the shoulders of your heros,
looking down at them.