During the pandemic, my family kept using the library.  In Maryland, after libraries shut down with the state’s declaration of an emergency, they re-opened for curbside pick-up and online ordering. 

We wore masks.  We stood in line. It didn’t take too long.  Of course, it was no costume party. 

Books, CDs, and DVDs, bring information, stories, inspiration, laughter, from everywhere in the world into two humble hands.  The library is a form of dialogue in a way.  It offers messages in a bottle as well as broadcasts to the world.  These vessels of human imagination know no borders, and very few borders have ever quarantined the ideas in a book.

This past year, my family revisited Hayao Miyzaki’s animated epic films, including the amazing Spirted Away, Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa (anime), all of which deal with relationships and the environment. 

Right now, I’m reading The Ancient Near East World, an illustrated history by Amanda H. Podany (Oxford University Press 2005), and learning about life in ancient Mesopotamia, courtesy of the local library.  As the poet Emily Dickinson said, “There is no frigate like a book.”

I also read and recommend Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, about Neanderthal hunter-gathers who lived in Europe and the Middle East from 300,000 B.C. to 40,000 B.C. or so.  I also picked up C. G. Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, my first dive into that famous psychologist-philosopher.  I recently enjoyed this excellent documentary about the U.S. 1950s-1960s folk scene and movement, and featuring Bob Dylan’s rise through it: Bob Dylan: The Greenwich Villages Years (ISBN 8-23564-54819-7). 

There is so much at the library.  How wealthy we are as a community and people with these shared, cherished available resources.

Thank you Loch Raven Review for publishing “Beginner’s Tale” in your Spring 2021 issue. Sort of strange to write a poem now and then over, I think, two decades; and then see where it arrived – to a beginning of sorts. “Beginner’s Tale” (Linked here).

Thank you Voices de la Luna for publishing “The Search” in your February 2021 issue – a journal based in South Texas. Linked here.

In February and March, I am rereading Walt Whitman’s 1855 first version of his Leaves of Grass, and of course finding new delights. I still have the Penguin Classics paperback edition, from my college days. Editor Malcolm Cowley of this edition remains right: Whitman’s first versions of his poems are freshest, brightest, and most invigorating.

Whitman, famously of the capacious self, strikes me as even more capacious this time around: literally peopled, transparent, yet returning again and again to himself, until of course, he leaves in lazy jags at the end of one of his poems.

Yesterday, I was struck this time around by this line from the “I am a teacher of athletes” section (No. 47):

“I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat.”

I enjoy the humor of it, and also its plain-speaking seriousness.

This last time I dived into the complete 1855 “Song of Myself” was on July 4, 2019, with a cousin of a friend – we took turns and read it out loud – as part of our casual, impromptu, and sun-baked and lazy July 4th celebration day in Hazelton, PA.

I still have the sleepers and some other episodes to finish up, and this won’t be the last time I revisit this epic.

Thank you Visitant Lit (West Coast, USA) for publishing “Pandora’s Moon,” with such an illuminated, scenic presentation. I appreciate!

Open to check it out here: Pandora’s Moon.

Thank you Visitant Lit (West Coast, USA) for publishing “Flight,” a poem that I worked on for about 15 years, and in such a stylish presentation too!

Check it out here: Flight.

Thank you or publishing “Janet’s Fire Escape” and “Dad’s Harvest Song” in your 2021 journal, from Saginaw Valley State University.

Thank you so much to JMWW Journal (USA) for publishing this long incubated poem!

Check it out here: https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/06/poetry-grandmother-in-silhouette-by-g-h-mosson/

These stay-at-home days offer lagoons of time to hang out together and to reflect.  Music has been a big part of many people’s home-based, pandemic days.

Grooves connect us.  The classical radio station, for some, may soothe. Listening to the radio can enlarge.  For me, many mornings begin again with jazz favorites, like Cookin’ by Miles Davis, Whisper Not by Keith Jarrett, and of course, Coltrane’s Love Supreme, which opens with a trumpet waking up.

What music means: Imagine a flower with a million petals.  Each petal is someone’s taste, boogie-down, dreamy escape, vibe.

In 2018— was it really three years ago! — rock singer Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries died from unknown causes.  She’d not been well, it appears.  For me, she was an iconic and brave singer, fierce with honesty.

Simultaneous Revolutions is a forthcoming poetry pamphlet from PM Press, by myself and Marcus Colasurdo, set for 2021.  This sequence dances with music as a recurrent subject and theme.  It has a poem dedicated to Dolores O’Riordan, which celebrates her music and its power.  I share:

ODE TO DOLORES

Can a woman loosen what’s hoped

so our hearts jam out in the open? 

Can she sing past what’s spoken

in the humdrum until

it’s unbroken

so our best intent’s

again in motion

like Dolores O’Riordan

of The Cranberries,

and how she shared

her emotions, a pugnacious Aphrodite

from some island hamlet

onto the world stage

until fate reclaimed its minute.

Yes, an emerald dazzler

who strutted and solo’d

to where conscience dares

and took us with her

so our pulses merged

into mirrors and made

a second family. 

G. H. Mosson and Marcus Colasurdo are the authors of Heart X-rays (PM Press 2018) and of several books in their individual names.  Their next collaboration of lyric poems is forthcoming from PM Press in 2021, Simultaneous Revolutions.  For more, click here.