In light of the Coronavirus crisis, please join Poetry Daily for an impromptu series, What Keeps Us.  For the rest of March we will post poems to sustain and uplift through trying times. We thank you for reading and hope that you will share poems with your friends and neighbors. Please be well.
Arthur Sze
I gaze at the Pacific and don’t expect
to ever see the heads on Easter Island,

though I guess at sunlight rippling
the yellow grasses sloping to shore;

yesterday a doe ate grass in the orchard:
it lifted its ears and stopped eating

when it sensed us watching from
a glass hallway—in his sleep, a veteran

sweats, defusing a land mine.
On the globe, I mark the Battle of

the Coral Sea—no one frets at that now.
A poem can never be too dark,

I nod and, staring at the Kenai, hear
ice breaking up along an inlet;

yesterday a coyote trotted across
my headlights and turned his head

but didn’t break stride; that’s how
I want to live on this planet:

alive to a rabbit at a glass door—
and flower where there is no flower.
from the book SIGHT LINES / Copper Canyon Press
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Photograph of Ian McKellen as King Lear and Danny Webb as Gloucester
"Shakespeare in Lockdown"

"When Shakespeare became a professional actor, then a playwright and shareholder in a London company, plague presented both a professional and existential threat....Between 1603 and 1613, when Shakespeare’s powers as a writer were at their height, the Globe and other London playhouses were shut for an astonishing total of 78 months—more than 60% of the time."

via THE GUARDIAN
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"After a year of college, I knew I was not going to major in Classics (early class times), Political Science (dry texts), or Philosophy (huh?), so I signed up for a course called Contemporary American Poetry. We met in the afternoon, in a classroom dominated by a wood table that had been worn by age into a dark honey. It was shaped like a pond, a near ellipse, and how it got into the room was unfathomable to me.”
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