Weekly poems elevate New Hampshire city’s virus newsletters

But after a planned trip there with high school students was scrapped in April due to the pandemic, she instead she wrote a poem honouring the nursing students whose graduation they were supposed to attend. And she has been highlighting Japanese forms of poetry, such as haiku — “Some nights are so dark/that the moon alone is sure/morning will come” — and tanka, which she described as more personal and metaphorical — “The bramble extends/a thorny cane offering/perfect raspberries/while everywhere else I look/an imperfect world festers.

Having long believed in the power of poetry to help people through difficult times, Truax said she gladly took on the challenge of composing poems weekly, even though that’s different from her usual process. Often she doesn’t write the poem until the day she submits it.

“Sometimes things are percolating all week long, and sometimes on Saturday morning I have no idea,” she said. “But we are living through extraordinary times, and every week seems to provide ample material for me to respond to.”

One poem evokes the toppling of monuments — a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement — while another describes police in Madrid delivering bouquets of tulips to hospital workers.

For the July 4 holiday weekend, she produced a “found poem” by extracting words from an Alexander Hamilton essay. The following week she marked the birthday of Frida Kahlo with a poem questioning what the artist, who was bedridden for months due to illness and later injury, would make of “those of us bemoaning isolation” and unwilling “to forego what we want, think we need, do desire.”

The Portsmouth public library is including the poems in a “community diary” documenting the pandemic, and the poem about the Nichinan nurses will be read at their delayed graduation ceremony in October.

“This really does have ripples that extend out,” said Stephanie Seacord, Portsmouth’s public information officer, who compiles the newsletter and came up with the idea of asking Truax to contribute, starting April 5.

“I thought, maybe we can offer a moment of calm in this sea of craziness,” Seacord said. “But now, to me, it has a life in that it’s part of the new normal. It’s part of the archive of what we’re all living through.”

Rochon said she was particularly touched by Truax’s latest poem, “Transitions,” in which she grieve’s a fellow poet’s impending death, hiding her tears behind her face mask and finding solace in harvesting a zucchini from her garden and baking it into bread for the young man who fixed her car.

“We all do that, don’t we? Whether we go into work, or go on a 20-mile bike ride, whatever it is, we all do that, just to be able to absorb that grief,” Rochon said. “It puts you in touch with something that’s real, and there’s a lot to be said for that.”

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While nonstop news about the effects of the coronavirus has become commonplace, so, too, have tales of kindness. “One Good Thing” is a series of AP stories focusing on glimmers of joy and benevolence in a dark time. Read the series here: https://apnews.com/OneGoodThing

Holly Ramer, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Weekly poems elevate New Hampshire city’s virus newsletters

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