Weekend Edition: The Staffords Speak to Us

I have previously shared poetry by Kim Stafford, Oregon's ninth poet laureate (April 23). Stafford says that he sees his duty as a poet to be "a witness to the world." He surely is that. He has been writing a series of daily pandemic poems, which you can find here: Pandemic Poems Here's one of them:

Pandemic Kinship

This old codger can breathe without pain
because a random girl he's never met didn't
touch a handrail. This mother will live to raise
her children because a clerk wore gloves and mask.
At dawn a grandmother at the coast can keep looking
for shells, humming along through the fog, because
a city family didn't make a day of it, didn't drive down
to breathe the salt air, then rummage the local store,
touching this and that. A doctor has just enough 
stamina to save a hundred, because thousands
performed the moral etiquette of restraint.

What we don't do saves strangers, and what
they don't do saves us. Now our best doing is
not doing, and kind wisdom the simple life.
                        ~Kim Stafford

Stafford is the son of the late and revered William Stafford, who also served us as poet laureate from 1974 to 1989, and who was always a witness to the world.

Here is a poem that William Stafford wrote in 1998 that resonates today:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot -- air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.
                     ~William Stafford



Until tomorrow, be safe and be well, and may the poets help to guide us. Caring for ourselves and for each other, we will get through this together, one step at a time.

Love,
Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Grandma

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