Pandemic Poems x Poetry Society of NY
Project Overview:
The Pandemic Poems X Poetry Society Of New York project was created amidst the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic aiming to group poets and writers together and create a series of sonnets. Each writer that subscribed to the project was paired with another subscriber and given the first and last line of a poem by coordinators of the event. The writer then had to go back and forth via email in order to construct a poem line by line with the guidance of the first and last line provided. The poems listed below are two separate poems I created with Nicholas Adamski and Mary Krontiris. The project did a beautiful job of giving artists and writers a chance to create, connect, and collaborate during a time of isolation no one has ever experienced before.
Sails & Silhouettes
Lexy Wanzell & Nicholas Adamski
And here is the window and here is the door,
a choice between touching clouds or resenting their altitude.
Between busting them with our minds or lying on our backs in the long grass, playing that game with the shapes, that one,
It's a witty puzzle,
where they all exist on the same playing field though will never truly fit together.
Unless we sink into a deeper kind of silence, of listening, and touch the ground in a way,
that teaches us to see ourselves in skies that feel too out of reach,
and to remember every shape that exists is constantly shifting, changing into some other form, the only difference is speed.
And we start to find grace in our pace, in each phase of the evolution that defines the mass of our silhouettes.
What joy, to feel the weight of this shadow, to stand between the sun and the earth,
to exist as the intersection between certainty and surrender.
To remember the mud and that time, by the stream, in the springtime, when the bank gave way beneath you, and you fell,
and you sunk to depths that have been waiting to show you a new surface,
to help us lift this veil and finally, with luck, trim these sails.
For there are stranger seas ahead, my dear, and I have seen them.
A Cure To The Shallows
Lexy Wanzell & Mary Krontiris
How many rivers does it take to build a world?
One where you don’t have to drown to inhabit it,
But just enough to turn her attention to the sails being furled.
With little hope that they will guide her somewhere familiar,
A time where she was nourished and pure.
With kinder winds and a current that she claimed
“Close your eyes,” she says, for I have a cure,
that lives in riverbeds that are far from home.
My rivers flow that can’t be untamed,
Speaks to me in prose, just like my grandmother who,
Glistened wisdom in this world to roam.
Casting light over her path like still water in June.
We have arrived as we looked upon to see a sliver,
The towers of the great bridge wade in the river