National Poetry Month, Day 14

I've been reading Poetry Friday posts to wind down from teaching online. One of them contained a writing prompt, part of a NPM project. Have you ever lost an object that was important to you, it began, and I thought, oh, no no no, can't be thinking about a prompt about loss, so I put it away for another time.

This has been one of Those Days. I've been angry, afraid, discouraged, frustrated, sad. I'm ready, at 5 PM, to give up on this day and go to bed.

Last month, Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, wrote a poem about the pandemic. It starts with a reference to Eyam (pronounced Eem), a village in England that isolated itself in 1665 to keep from passing the plague to other towns.

Lockdown
by Simon Armitage

And I couldn't escape the waking dream
of infected fleas

in the warp and weft of soggy cloth
by the tailor's hearth

in ye olde Eyam.
Then couldn't un-see

the Boundary Stone,
that cock-eyed dice with its six dark holes,

thimbles brimming with vinegar wine
purging the plagued coins.

These references, and others, are explained in this article (which also includes the rest of the poem), and to me it was completely worth the effort to unravel any obscurity, because something that's been fairly reliably cheering me up through this whole nightmare has been learning about times in the past when people went through challenges (like this one or different) and triumphed, or at least made it. (Like, for example, this podcast about the quarantine in Florence in 1629.)

And here's some Emily Dickinson:

1292

In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much - how little - is within our power

And here's something fun I found while reading those Poetry Friday posts:on the first Friday in April, Laura Salas posted her poem "Things to Do If You Are Spring." She asked readers to contribute a line to a new "Things to Do If You Are Spring" poem, and this past Friday she posted the results here.

And finally, here are today's lines for the Progressive Poem.

1 Donna Smith at Mainly Write
2 Irene Latham at Live Your Poem
3 Jone MacCulloch, deowriter
4 Liz Steinglass
5 Buffy Silverman
6 Kay McGriff at kaymcgriff
7 Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core
8 Tara Smith at Going to Walden
9 Carol Varsalona at Beyond Literacy Link
10 Matt Forrest Esenwine at Radio, Rhythm, and Rhyme
11 Janet Fagel, hosted at Reflections on the Teche
12 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
13 Kat Apel at Kat’s Whiskers
14 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
15 Leigh Anne Eck at A Day in the Life
16 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
17 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
18 Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading
19 Tabatha at Opposite of Indifference
20 Rose Cappelli at Imagine the Possibilities
21 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
22 Julieanne Harmatz at To Read, To Write, To Be
23 Ruth at thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com
24 Christie Wyman at Wondering and Wandering
25 Amy at The Poem Farm
26 Dani Burtsfield at Doing the Work That Matters
27 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
28 Jessica Big at TBD
29 Fran Haley at lit bits and pieces
30 Michelle Kogan at moreart4all