Poetry Month: 'Thoughts in Time of Plague'

A.F. Moritz

The front page of Wednesday's Toronto Star featured "Thoughts in Time of Plague," a new poem by the city's poet laureate, Al Moritz. When he was asked by the newspaper to write about the Covid-19 crisis, "he knew he was going to write a poem, that the city wanted him to, but wasn't sure how to get at it," the Star noted.

"This crisis is something that afflicts everybody," he said. "We're all going through this and we all have our own individual thoughts and experiences.... Sometimes when you get an inspiration for a poem you're filled with your own bright idea. You think you have some revelation to the world.... You have to sort of share something as opposed to telling something, and it's not always easy to do that....

"You'll notice that the poem has the kind of dialogue back and forth between being on the road, a wanderer, and being at home, a householder, and how, in a way, strangely, they can almost be the same thing or two sides of the same coin. That's something that's always been very important to me.... Real progress takes places in the moment within each human being. Real progress is love."

From "Thoughts in Time of Plague":

Whether on the road with nowhere
to lay them down, or in the room with nowhere
else to take them… When we had to watch
the threatened breathing or leave it
to go to work. When we had to hear they had died

without us--was it different? No. No different.
Except that we saw something we always knew
in the dark. Failure was not
and success had never been
the end. The end was care.
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