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This Photo

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

This is what workplace violence looks like.

Erin Schaff’s photo published in The New York Times online edition on February 11, 2021, captured the reaction of House Speaker Pelosi’s staff as they watched video evidence of the January 6 insurrection. 

Nine months later, the image still haunts me.

I don’t know their names or their titles, so I cannot tell their personal stories. But I’ve known their predecessors, who like them, turned down post-grad offers on Wall Street and in prestigious law firms to serve their country with little recognition and minimal compensation.

These folks were at their desks, doing their best to serve the American people on January 6, 2021.

A month later, they were back @work, watching the videos obtained by congressional impeachment managers. “The humming rhythms of Capitol Hill do not easily allow for prolonged moments of reflection, let alone in the aftermath of an insurrection.”  A quote that could describe most Americans, caught up in the challenges and rhythms of their daily pandemic lives. 

What would a close-up of Speaker Pelosi’s staff record today? I’m guessing intense focus on the work of passing two historic pieces of legislation. 

I wonder what they think of the journalists who continue to search for truth. Was Sunday a difficult day as they awoke to the headline reporting of ‘The Attack’ in the Washington Post?

Violence in the workplace is a continuum. You may choose not to let it define you. But it’s always there.

At the end of the day, it’s not the politicians and the pundits who maintain our democracy, but the courage of interns and staffers in Washington D.C. whose problem-solving commitment to constituents keep this country on track. 

Today, election day, step away from the analysts and consider the world of the young idealists of Capitol Hill with gratitude.

The Friday Poem: ‘How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry?’ by Julia Alvarez

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

Last spring, author Valeria Luiselli accepted the British Rathbone Folio Prize for her novel, ‘Lost Children Archive’. She spoke of the writer’s responsibility, “whether a science-fiction writer, a journalist, a poet, each at their own pace and within their own capacities, to document this moment”.

“We are going to need this narrative fabric, some sort of fabric for us to lay down once we overcome this.”

One expression of this “narrative fabric” is the recently published poetry anthology, ‘Together in a Sudden Strangeness’ edited by Alice Quinn.  

The Friday Poem selection for this week is Julia Alvarez’s ‘How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry?’ As we reimagine our priorities ‘after’, framed by our experience in the ‘before times’ and pandemic isolation, where will art reside? 

How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry?

Will the lines be six feet apart?

Will these hexameters be heroic like Homer’s?

(Will) (each) (word) (have) (to) (be) (masked) (?)

Will there be poetry insecurity?

Will there be enough poetry to go around?

Will poems be our preferred form of travel?

Will we undertake odysseys searching for Ithacas inside us?

Will poetry go viral?

Will its dis/ease infect us?

Will it help build up antibodies against indifference?

Will poems be the only safe spaces where we can gather together:

            enter their immense silences

            see snakes slithering inside sestinas, 

            listen to nightingales singing on the boughs of odes –

            hark! a lark in the terza rima,

            a hawk in a haiku?

What if only poetry will see us through?

What if this poem is the vaccine already working inside you?

Julia Alvarez

April 27 – May 8, 2020

Weybridge, Vermont

‘Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic’

Alice Quinn, editor    Alfred A. Knopf, New York    2020