January 11, 2023
By Roy Hoffman, faculty, fiction and creative nonfiction
Although I don’t consider myself a poet, over the years I’ve made countless word sketches in my notebooks—images, meditations, responses to heightened moments. Sometimes I share these lines with family and friends, or offer them, typed up from my crabbed handwriting, as gifts on special occasions. During quarantine, 2020, I found myself turning often to this intimate form of expression.
One evening of that surreal time, while socially distancing with friends in my Alabama town, I read aloud Covid jottings. Hearing them, Lynn Yonge, a physician friend who dedicates free time to artmaking, had an idea: a pop-up Covid art show, my verses part of it. He put print-outs of my stanzas behind plexiglass on an easel, stationed it on a stand out front of the Fairhope Eastern Shore Art Center, and invited pieces from an art group he’d founded, Gulf Space. What came in, surrounding my poetry, were works witty, poignant, and political.
As folks ambled the streets, eager to stretch their limbs during lockdown, they’d pause to explore the outdoor display, titled “Corona.” Many wanted to comment on the art or talk to me about what I’d written, eager to express their own reactions to a crisis, locally and globally, no one of our era had experienced before.
I was reminded of the power of language, and art, to engage, to set dialogue in motion, and how one aesthetic form adds dimension to another. We might hope to create for the ages, but addressing the moment has a value all its own, from a pen to the town square, where each passerby can dream their own images, tell their own stories, to connect and heal.
FAIRHOPE PANDEMIC, by Roy Hoffman
March & April 2020
1. INTERTWINED
On a first sultry night,
Beneath a silver moon surrounded
By the shimmering light
Of a quiescent bay,
He sat in the middle of a
Pandemic.
If it were only him
In the world
It would seem another
Of his fictions, invented
Tales to reach a deeper truth.
But the rabbi had said
In the virtual service where
None could touch but
Came together to pray:
“We are all intertwined.”
So he sat alone but was
Not. What others endured
He could not turn away.
If others gasped he listened to
Their inhalations, exhalations,
If their families
Wept behind glass
He heard them, too.
The absence of any human
As far as he could see
Was the sounding of
An alarm, a voice
Reminding,
“We are close.
Know us in this hour,
Recognize what we are
All going through
Deep in our bones.”
2. RISK
In the contagion
we seek the wind
on the pier,
the sky surging with
blue, the sounds of
our voices
closer to each other
than we can be
except to those
We risk to love.
3. DANGER
So easy this breeze,
Glorious this sun,
It is hard to imagine that,
On the walking path,
We veer away
From each other lest we
Infect each other
With our breath.
4. NO STRANGER
In the Publix aisle your eyes above the mask,
Red bandana or light-blue cloth,
Makes me guess your name,
Even your voice, muffled,
Doesn’t give you away.
When you slip down the protection
We greet each other, long familiar
From the neighborhood—
That fun dinner gathering,
The big birthday party—
It’s that easy, these days, to conceal.
Once the terror has passed
Let’s remember to take stock
Of each other,
Watching, listening, imprinting
What’s unmistakable about
Every remarkable soul.
Roy Hoffman, a member of the fiction and creative nonfiction faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, is author of six books, most recently the novel The Promise of the Pelican. www.royhoffmanwriter.com