Warrior Prose; Writing Poems to Weather the Pain

“What was the year 2020 but pain, nothing but pain. But there was poetry, too. How do you write the pain away? How do you make sense of it all? I wanted to write a poem, an acrostic poem for all of the ones who had passed away when it was 10,000, and then I realized that would take a really long time, and that it was too many names. How could I remember them all? And now it’s almost a half a million gone. I can’t write 464,000 poems, but I can write about, maybe 200, maybe 15, maybe one. Just one. Writing poetry stops the blood from freezing. Writing poetry makes sense of the unbelievable, of the untenable. I write to breathe. I write to allow light into the darkness.”