This is a public service message from your local community poet.  Stay home!

Now, back to our regular programming…

Publius Ovidius Naso: AKA Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature.

As the poet, Ovid once said

Here are the rules: any verse is okay, rhymes and meter optional, any language, add Your verse or verses as a comment and share with others and together we will write the Greatest Elegy in the History of Pandemics.  Take that Publius!

Elegy to The Coronavirus Pandemic

We’ve been to London and to France

But now we’re staying home

Not heading to a Sardinian dance

Cause now we’re staying home

What need have we of coffee out

For now we’re staying home

With so much risk and so much doubt

Oh yes,  we’re staying home

Who really needs a dinner out

Damn straight we’re staying home

Baseball and Olympic Flames

Not now, we’re staying home

We all will miss the precious games

Still now we’re staying home

it’s been announced that
the future is suspended
plans upended indefinitely

dreams postponed
being in the moment
is current “superior” mandate

involuntary enlightenment
if there ever was one
humorless oxymoron

how contrary it feels
to the world begotten
with a live shiny droplet

now a different particle
that escapes definition of life
works at cross-purpose

yet the universe will
deny it its nourishment
as we pray and hope sincerely…

We are in a precious moment of essential life

A global purification and concentration of creativity

Feel the wondrous light emanating

From the shared emotion

as we stand together on the edge

Don’t you feel alive!

(Hold this moment as you would any precious substance)

First person to identify the three songs, gets a beer when this thing is over.  nancy is responsible for the sun cleansing.

“Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side.  Keep on the sunny side of life

Sunny, thank you for the love that you gave to me.”

“Sunshine on my pillow makes me happy.”

Good Morning World.

The river that connects us all is flowing deeply through my sub-conscious.  Why else would I write at two in the morning?

I remember being a schoolchild, how excited it felt to awaken in the morning to a blanket of white powder and hear on the radio that school was closed!

A day of snowballs and snowmen was rich.

Yes, I understand this is different, but stepping outside into the crystal clear and cold air last night there was a panoply of glittering stars.  I took a deep breath, inviting the air into my lungs and savoring the feeling.  How sweet it is to feel human, to step away from the grinding machine of life in the modern world.

Each day, the red circles of Coronavirus clusters saturate the global map.  In a few weeks, the circles will disappear and all will be in red.

Some of us will take leave, most will not, and when the red fades the machine will slowly come back to life.

Savor these moments.  Savor———-these——–moments.

Breathe the air, drink water, stay warm, sleep, and join me on the river, exhaling the vapor of life above the flowing water.

I wrote this for my daughter but think she won’t mind if I share it with others. She is tirelessly working to protect the health of the people she works for in Dallas, Texas-that is all the people of Dallas, and Texas, and all of us.

I’m throwing my embrace around you in a massive cosmic way to keep you safe from anything.

These words are not anything more than thoughts evaporating into space.

Fate plays its hand when we take our eye off the ball. On a planet with between seven billion people, a crisis happens every day. It only feels real when it touches us. Today, it is real.

Many thought the horror of WW1-The War to End All Wars would unify the world and bring us to a more harmonious place (it did not). Robert Oppenheimer thought the destructive implications of nuclear weapons would arouse a spirit of shared horror and bring the world together (it did not).

Neither did we come together when we saw the moon from outer space, nor have we become of one mind from witnessing mass animal extinctions, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, global warming, destructive hurricanes, genocides, fires, droughts, deluge, or pandemics.

We are fragile little creatures no different than any other.

We react better than we plan. We grieve better than we prevent grief. We may have rational faculties but we seldom deploy collective rationality before a crisis. We are what we are.

Bus drivers in Mexico like to surround themselves with talismans and plaques with thoughtful sayings. One read, “God is my boss, but I do the driving.”

Before Super Bowl XII, both teams had self-professed “Born Again” quarterbacks. For The Denver Broncos, Craig Morton, and for the Dallas Cowboys, Roger Staubach. In a television interview with both men before the game, a reporter asked who would win. Morton answered, “If God wants it, Denver will.” Staubach replied, “I think God wants us to win.”*

Take the reins of your life. Take care of yourselves and the people you love and the others who need your support.

This too shall pass.

*Cowboys won: 27:10.

Today

-I called an older friend to be sure he was staying in and that he had enough food. He reported back that he had stocked up on wine.
-No sneezes or coughs.
-I heard one person cough at Costco, fifty feet away from me. I abandoned my cart for a few minutes and washed my hands for thirty seconds. Good soap at Costco and air dryers. All the employees wore gloves but there were no pepperoncini. Checkout lines were long and the chicken cases were empty but the beef cases were full. Salsa was cheap. The hot dog and pizza stand was overflowing and the seating area was packed like sardines. I’m done with stores until things settle.
-Dug a fence post hole and am eager to start the garden
-Washed my hands five times today for at least thirty seconds each time.
-Hugged one person over fifty. Living dangerously!
-I believe I touched my face a few times but only after washing my hands.

I worked on Soviet fishing vessels in the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea in the late seventies and early eighties. The Soviets were poor and the ships didn’t have amenities most Americans took for granted, like toilet paper! Ship latrines were open-pit squat toilets and daily visits, especially when the ship pitched and rolled in the waves, were not a pleasant experience.

But Russians, maybe as an expression of their ability to persevere in the face of great hardship, are inventive and find creative solutions to scarcity. They do not have an entitled sense of abundance and can build, modify, and fix anything.

No toilet paper, no problem!

One thing the Soviet Union never had a shortage of was written propaganda. If you’re old enough, you remember the Soviet Union’s main newspaper was called, Pravda, the Russian word for truth. Pravda was everywhere, even at sea. Waxing philosophical, the truth can take many forms.

On Soviet ships, the truth took the form of a triangle. In fact, ship latrines had stacks of triangles cut from Pravda; small, technique requiring triangles. The metaphorical irony of Pravda as toilet paper was not lost on the Russian sailors who frequently joked about the “appropriate use of Pravda.”

As Americans, in their frenzied response to the Coronavirus, sweep into to snatch up extra rolls of toilet paper, I wonder what it says about us that the first thought we have when panicked is to protect out toilet hygiene. Here’s a first, LOL.

What does it tell us about ourselves that in the midst of a pandemic we stock up on toilet paper? (Another LOL thinking about a Freudian analysis of this) I’ll leave that for you to ponder, but one thing I know is that you can’t clean your behind by asking for help from Siri or Alexa.

And that is a little dose of the Damn Pravda!

The photo was shot by my friend, Eric Mirell, in 1972. It looks across the parking garage by where he lived on Kingsbridge Terrace. I was seventeen and had lots of hair. Albert was the young chimpanzee we took care of in my high school’s Animal Care Program, which trained students to be zookeepers at the Bronx Zoo. We also had a lion, Angela, who we walked through the Bronx one day.

On this day, Albert held me close as any young child would when out on the streets of NYC. I took Albert to my house where he promptly climbed the curtains and wreaked havoc on things. It was EPIC! New Yorkers are fairly naive about anything outside of the norms of the city and seeing a chimpanzee blew a lot of minds. I also had a boa constrictor that I trotted around from time to time.

On a personal note, I see my face and darkened eyes and it reminds me of why I left the city barely eighteen months later.

C