7a. Pandemic Poems: Sheltering from the Curve

Remember that terrible time that's disappearing in the rear view mirror? The sense of impending doom, the fear and isolation, before we knew exactly how it was spread and what to do to stay alive. The lock down. The great pause. Except for 'essential workers' to whom we owe so much. Sue shares her poem distilling details from that time and a tiny bit of hope as nature flourished in the quiet. For the written poem with artwork, as well as links to the fascinating world of epidemiology as well as the prompts and open mics, see our show notes and our website.

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Sue: 00:11

Hello. Deborah Backel Schmidt and I, Sue Boudreaux here, your follower of fish poetry conversations and inspiration hosts. Friends and neighbors for ages now enjoying the deep conversations of being poetry podcast pals. Every episode concludes with a prompt to inspire you to write and send something in or to read it out at our poetry open mic coming up on March 15. We hosted the first poetry open mic at the Good Table Cafe space in El Sobrante in February.

Sue: 00:42

From that, we're going to be reading out and inviting local poet guests onto the show shortly. Our next poetry open mic is on Sunday, March 15. It's designed to be a very positive and encouraging experience. Others might be feeling something similar right and right there, a deeper conversation, which is better than how's your cold coming along? At least it's not COVID, which is of course a perfect segue into today's pandemic theme, That terrible time that it's oddly easy to forget.

Sue: 01:13

The sense of impending doom, the start of the final catastrophe. The social isolations and stories of the plague, the flu of nineteen eighteen, closing schools, working from home, the coincident emergencies of wildfire, January 6 and Black Lives Matter. It was a terrible time to be a teacher, a terrible time to be seeing a dark future as a 12 year old student lurking behind their screens in their pajamas. There were a few odd blessings in the tragedies. The clear air, the quiet, the rattling bicycles out of sheds, exploring local trails, picking up instruments for nothing better to do, and the resurgence of nature.

Sue: 01:55

So Deborah and I are going to share poems from that time that's rapidly receding in our rearview mirror. It's especially important to remember because the anti vax directives from the CDC are making future pandemics more likely. It really could have been even worse and might be next time. Airborne transmission of an even more lethal disease that leapt from animals to the unsuspecting human immune system is especially feared by immunologists. Like haemorrhagic fever such as Ebola, the bird flu and well I'll just leave it there.

Sue: 02:29

The show notes as usual have further resources about the science of pandemics, infectious diseases and the future threats we face. What really stands out for you from your pandemic experience? Put yourself back at the very start of the pandemic, into the middle of the shutdown and the gradual lifting of the emergency. Sit back and take a trip back with the poems from Me Today and Deborah Tomorrow. I'm going to be reading a poem called Sheltering from the Curve, which I wrote on March 22, which was just after the start of the pandemic in 2020 and the shutdown.

Sue: 03:14

Nature smooths anxiety this pretty spring day. The everyday business busyness contrasts with quiet. Skies sharply blued from the lack of traffic, as factories cut back, construction on hold, machinery stilled not stirring up dust. The economies stall and real wants want waits just around the curve. We're all stuck at home wanting to do something, but instead respecting personal space.

Sue: 03:46

Well, except for parents of teens nosing over shoulders for texts suggesting escape when the family is asleep. Small children bugging dad who's trying to type or to use the bathroom alone for just one damn minute, trying to ignore small fingers wriggling under the door. Particulate settled, washed out of the air, the city in the distance now clear. Sunsets less orange, planets and stars piercingly bright. Streets oddly empty these days.

Sue: 04:20

Cyclists are reclaiming their rights slightly, self righteously. A helmet crammed onto escaping grey hair, a woman wobbles uncertainly almost into the road. She's one of many rattling bikes forgotten in sheds, pumping up tires, squeezing into shorts retrieved from the back of a drawer, dabbing oil everywhere except hopefully the brakes. The bees are ecstatic, they usually are at this time of year, making a halo of around Ceanothus in blue bloom. The budding wisteria waterfalls over the bins, taming it will be a welcome but smallish chore, a distraction from the grafts ticking up so steeply and dizzy with the seriousness of what we'll see next.

Sue: 05:07

Refocusing me instead on the intricacies of nature I normally forget. There are a few mercies at the curve of the wave, but I'm not quite quieted yet. I'm afraid.

Deborah: 05:26

Well, Sue, you really pull us back into that moment in time with that poem. I particularly enjoy your portrayal of the great hush that descended at the start of the pandemic. And you write the everyday business busyness. I love your wordplay with those near homophones there. Contrast with quiet, Skies sharply blued from the lack of traffic as factories cut back, construction on hold, machinery stilled, not stirring up dust.

Deborah: 05:58

You restored to us memories of how many of us in that time were open to intricacies of nature we normally ignore. And that's a quote from you as well. And you describe some of those intricacies so beautifully. The ecstatic bees, quote, making a halo of around Ceanothus in blue bloom, the budding wisteria waterfalls over the bins. So what do you think we can learn from the pandemic imposed moratorium on human activity?

Deborah: 06:31

I guess this is part of the question. Do you think it's possible for us to implement a periodic hash to reduce our human impact and give nature a break on a regular basis?

Sue: 06:41

I wouldn't think so, America. I mean, it's just not really part of our culture to have the government kind of interfere at that level. I mean, I think we could do it on a personal level and I know that both you and I do tend to do that and take some pauses. And I guess that's a part of what the Sabbath is, right? But I think that, you know, in a capitalist society that we're in, with money and power being so prominent, I guess nature may actually raise up at some time and smack us in the face, and that'll probably be too late.

Sue: 07:16

Because nature will survive, in fact life will survive, and the question on the bumper sticker is, will we? And for us to survive, I think we have to work with nature and with solutions that are a win win for both us and nature, and for the people who live in areas that we want to conserve.

Deborah: 07:32

You say we're all stuck at home. If there were so many who had no option but to work outside the home through the pandemic, can you reflect on how those times exposed the divide between the haves and the have nots, those with choices, those without?

Sue: 07:49

Mira is so right. I had inadvertently fallen into the trap of thinking everybody was just like me. But at the time, I was so aware that I was particularly privileged, and not just to have a job that I could do, I might say with a lot of effort, because going to full on remote teaching from one day to the next quite a And thankfully I had colleague Marshall who was enormously helpful with that. But we had the option of doing a job online and that meant I had a regular salary coming in and also a sense of purpose purpose and a kind of structure to the day. And for me that would have been really awful to not have structure.

Sue: 08:31

But of course having to go out into the world during that time, you really at the beginning of the pandemic did not know very much about the disease. We didn't know that it was very infectious.

Deborah: 08:44

You weren't even sure how yet.

Sue: 08:45

Right, you know, I remember people wiping down their groceries.

Deborah: 08:47

Oh yeah, we did that.

Sue: 08:49

Yeah, and so to be a person that kind of had to go into work during those times, I just cannot imagine. So I'm left with this enormous sense of gratitude for people in grocery stores, for people who delivering, and it did expose a lot of social inequities. And some did result in a bit of good. For example, I know that in Contra Costa County, people who were homeless had places inside offered to them. And there were tax credits and other financial help and legal help to help people stay housed.

Sue: 09:23

And I had tenants at the time who benefited from that. And there was a massive effort to improve access to the internet and computers and schools. Yeah. But unfortunately, most of these changes have now expired. And so that social good that it did didn't really last.

Deborah: 09:40

Right. In the poem you skillfully introduce your topic in the first lines, Nature smooths anxiety this pretty spring day. But in the end, you are, quote, not quite quieted yet. Having survived the pandemic, do you find you are less anxious now? And if not, what are your biggest current worries and what brings you peace of mind?

Sue: 10:04

Wow. That's a question like asking me about my whole life So I'm going to try and keep it brief. At the start, if you remember, there were lovely stories of people singing together from their balconies in Italy. In England, people would bang pots and pans to thank the health workers at a certain time every day, like at 06:00 in the evening. And you know, was lovely.

Sue: 10:35

There was all kinds of neighborhood stuff that went on. I think we deepened friendships in the neighborhood, people out walking their dogs round and around and around the block. And some of those things have endured I think. I think that the neighborhood cohesiveness was something that I think has endured a lot. Wildlife was coming back into places they hadn't been seen for I think David Attenborough actually put a documentary together about the recovery and of it's still there, it's left its footprints in the research literature of conservation where, you know, there were some wild animals and threatened animals that were making a comeback during that time.

Sue: 11:15

Like cheetahs for example don't do well when they're observed. They're very shy cats because they have their prey stolen from them all the time by bigger cats. And so without tourists there observing them in the safari trucks, they actually did quite a bit

Deborah: 11:32

better. Oh, fascinating. So there's

Sue: 11:34

of stories about stuff like that, but in the end, the pandemic in America seems to have been a real catalyst for division and not for unity in the face of danger. And there's a Pew poll that came out recently called How COVID-nineteen Changed America Five Years On. And it shows an increasing partisan divide along things like vaccination, on how serious people thought the COVID epidemic was, on the efficacy of the shutdown, all of that kind of thing has driven, I think, at least I don't necessarily think, but you know, with the analysis I read, seems to feel that it has actually been a turning point towards division, which is just so It's sad, really. I'm worried about all kinds of infectious diseases, particularly the airborne bird flu. Marshall and I read the flu of 1918 as soon as the pandemic shutdown started, and it was way worse than this.

Sue: 12:36

And we're actually just a mutation away from a flu that is incredibly lethal, and we're lucky that some of the hemorrhagic fevers are not airborne at the moment. Measles is actually a much bigger threat than I realized, and it's one of the most infectious diseases. So it's making a resurgence with falling vaccinations. Yes. And I did not know this, but one in five people require hospitalization from the measles.

Deborah: 13:00

I had no idea.

Sue: 13:01

I didn't, yeah. And it can have long lasting serious health effects as well. And the other one that I'm worried about is tuberculosis, which is also very infectious. It has been a huge killer in the past and it's now developing resistance to antibiotics. Ouch, you know.

Sue: 13:17

So there is, in terms of epidemiology, there are some things that the World Health Organization is pretty clearly afraid of happening.

Deborah: 13:26

With good cause.

Sue: 13:28

But in terms of hopefulness, I really believe in the essential goodness of human nature. And it kind of makes sense that we evolve to be cooperative. I mean, if you think about the threats that our hunter gatherer ancestors faced Mhmm. Working together is what made us so successful. So I believe that our good nature will resurge and save us, and I kind of like the analogy of seed crystals causing the sudden crystallization in a saturated solution to make like a more perfect crystal.

Sue: 13:58

I like that. Kind of cool. And things seem really harsh right now with the war in Iran spreading and the pullback from environmental protection. But time can seem very short or very long, and worse things have happened, and people have survived with their bravery, ingenuity, and integrity. So I'm especially inspired by a guy called Rutger Bregman.

Sue: 14:21

He wrote something called Humankind, a hopeful history, and his more recent book, Moral Ambition, How to Find Your Purpose. He's also written Utopia for Realists and had founded a school for moral ambition, to divert our best and brightest, our most committed and ingenious, to do something for good, rather than getting a job as a hedge fund manager, contract lawyer, or stockbroker. But in fact, all of these professions can be leveraged for great good as well. So I really encourage our listeners check out his work. It's been a real source of inspiration for me.

Sue: 14:56

And for me personally, it's always a challenge not to get sucked down the plug hole, as you can tell about the whole business with the bird flu. And I kind of love watching those, you know, pandemic movies and Contagion and stuff, and I read it with this fascinating horror. And I'd love to, you know, in order not to get sucked down the plug hole, I go into nature and being in nature, thinking about friends and family that I love, spending time with them, encouraging them and having a good chat, a good laugh and being in the gorgeous outdoors with my dog. Those are some of the things that I do. As well as of course making podcasts with you.

Sue: 15:34

Yay! So the prompt for today is simple. It's going to just be pandemic. What's the mood that you remember? The key event that tipped you off that it was going to be so much more than a bad flu season?

Sue: 15:49

What were the effects it had on you or somebody you know or knew? Or on nature? And the tiny bright spots within this terrible time? As ever, take a breath, write random words that pop into your head. Sometimes just letting a pen swirl on paper helps me to find a starting point.

Sue: 16:06

A word that swims up at me. Write something, let it rest if you need, and come back. Then edit and send in your work to curiositycatpodcastsgmail dot com in the knowledge that you have an audience, us. We will respond with short, specific, positive comments and perhaps inclusion on this on the show, which you can help us grow by sharing, subscribing, and badgering your friends to listen.

Deborah: 16:34

As always, we love to hear your responses to the prompts. Besides emailing print versions to curiositycatpodcastsgmail dot com, you're also welcome to send us a voice recording at .wav file. Or let us know if you'd like us to record your poem for you, because we may choose a poem to read aloud on a future show. Whether or not we do, we will respond to all submissions. Also at curiositycatpodcasts.com, you can read our show notes, read the poems in print, and see the artwork chosen to go with them.

Deborah: 17:08

You can leave us a rating and or a review via your podcast provider, and please share us with your friends. Our theme music, Penelope Rag, is composed by John Partridge and played by John and me with him on piano and Mia on flute. All production and editing are done right here in El Sorrento, California by my friend Sue Boudreaux. Thanks for listening.