Haiku Poetry for the Covid Pandemic: Witnessing and Connecting

How to put into words a devastating pandemic that upends the world and our daily experiences of life, love and community? Haiku Poetry for the Covid Pandemic brings together over ninety short poems that usher us through the first two years of the pandemic. The poems are variously serious and whimsical, capturing Covid-19's sweeping reach-from the blunt fact of barren store shelves, to shimmering questions dwelling in the great unknown. Beginning in March 2020 with the declaration of the pandemic, this poetry of witness and relation contends with death, grief, loss and loneliness as it also offers words of healing and hope. It invokes the experience of living simultaneously with the existential and the mundane, as we negotiate new relationships to restaurants, homes, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, grocery stores, and romance. By 2021, the poems begin to shake off the bewildering shock and awe of the preceding "blurs-year" during which many of us felt disconnected from ordinary time. They do this by giving urgent witness to discrete events, striving to be present in unique moments despite the confounding coronavirus's refusal to leave. When the collection ends in March 2022, we are left standing at the uncertain threshold of Covid 3.0, glancing at these poems in the side-view mirror.