March 21: Front Lines, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Poem from "Kyrie"

Yes, I am sitting in a hospital right now, stopping and questioning people walking through an entrance.  Yes, I am masked.  Yes, I have disinfected my hands about 20 times since I sat down at this desk.  And the confirmed cases of coronavirus continues to grow.

I am writing these posts as a record for my children when they get older.  My daughter, born the year before the 9-11 attack, doesn't remember a time before the "War on Terror."  My son, who is eleven-years-old, will probably have little recollection of a time before the Covid-19 Pandemic.

I'm sure, after the dust settles, the world is going to be a very different place for everyone.  People won't hug as much.  They'll avoid walking near strangers.  They will probably have large stores of nonperishable foods in their houses.  (Child:  "Why do grandma and grandpa have so many cans of spaghetti sauce?"  Adult:  "Because they grew up during the Coronavirus Pandemic.")  Everything will change, good or bad.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, in her Author's Note to her poetry collection Kyrie, writes of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918, ". . . the national memory bears little trace."  The blog posts I'm writing during this time are my attempt to preserve these memories for my kids and their kids' kids.

Saint Marty is reporting from the front lines, as a healthcare worker and educator.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

This is the double bed where she'd been born,
bed of her mother's marriage and decline,
bed her sisters also ripened in,
bed that drew her husband to her side,
bed of her one child lost and five delivered,
bed indifferent to the many bodies,
bed around which all of them were gathered,
watery shapes in the shadows of the room,
and the bed frail abroad the violent ocean,
the frightened beasts so clumsy and pathetic,
heaving their wet breath against her neck,
she threw off the pile of quilts--white face like a moon--
and then entered straighway into heaven.