I run a poetic agency that specializes in event entertainment. During the first week of March, as the COVID-19 pandemic really started to take over our global consciousness, all of our bookings for the next 6 weeks were cancelled, with good reason of course.

With a lot of time on my hands and a huge community of working artists, event producers, small businesses and more out of work, I wanted to think of some small thing I could do to keep connections strong, surpass xenophobic and fearful responses, and also respect the science around staying physically distant from each other to reduce the spread of the virus.

I started sending photos of poems to struggling colleagues, then thought that sick and quarantined people could really use poems too. Then I saw that the anxiety was taking over our whole global society, and that there were probably a lot more people out there that would like to see a friendly face, hear a friendly voice, or just see a poem written just for them, created by an artist perhaps all the way on the other side of the world, but thinking of them and caring for them all the same.

I have no idea what is going to happen in the weeks and months to come, but my deepest hope is that by receiving a poem from one of our volunteer writers around the world, we will create a web of compassion and resilience that will soften this blow and make recovery in some way easier and quicker, and we will return to a more beautiful and empathetic world.

I’m also deeply inspired by this poem that Dori Midnight wrote for this time, for your further reading enjoyment.

Much love, and health.

Lisa Ann (LAMARKS) Markuson