Dear friends, we are entering the strangest and most challenging of tunnels. These last few weeks I know that I, along with everyone else, has been frantic – trying to mentally catch up to what this pandemic means, even as it keep changing, scrambling to recreate my working life from home, trying hard to manage the rising anxiety and its different manifestations, reaching out to the people I love.

Poetry has been on the back burner amidst all this. But I thought about Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (a whole year??) and thought I would try and record some of my thoughts and reflections during this unprecedented time. Please follow the blog – tell me what you’re thinking, respond to what I’m able to put out there. Let’s converse.

As we move into this uncertain time, here’s a poem from my second book Unexpected Clearing (UWAP 2016), ‘Under the Wave’, that speaks to both the risk and the possibility of such a dive:

Under the Wave

Slipping under the wave –

that space where even sand

might settle,

          unswirled, where

the turbulence that rakes at the roots of your hair

          filling it with grit,

                     yanking it back toward the wildness of the surface,

a kind of reverse gravity,

might yet,   like the hand of god,   pass over you –

slip under the wave,

you know its towering confluence of tide and wind,

the crushing hammer of its foamy fist;

watch, where the form of your flailing, human body,

with all its intricacies of angle and organ,

might turn its fins in this mottled light,

negotiating an ancient element –

slip under the wave,

make for the sky.