In March, a 19-year-old girl in Chicago sent a group text to her friends suggesting they buy supplies for people in their neighborhood who had lost their jobs. The proliferation of community fridges, COVID relief funds, impromptu person-to-person Venmo gifts, viral debt relief campaigns, and mutual aid initiatives has been swift and uplifting. It would be easy for all the people who drew the long demographic straws in this crisis to hole up at home feeling a mix of gratitude and guilt, and wait for it to be over - but that’s not what’s happening. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires. Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty. This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling. Maybe it was the unspoken question she posed at the end from her solitary room: “I’ve heard it in the chillest land / And on the strangest Sea / Yet - never - in Extremity / It asked a crumb - of me.” Her room overlooked a cemetery, and many of her poems are focused on death.Īs the winter of 2020 approached, I might have expected one of those poems to keep floating to mind, but instead it was her writing on hope: “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” it begins, “/ That perches in the soul / And sings the song without the words / And never stops - at all -”
Though her isolation was voluntary, I doubt it was easy.
The following is a copy of MacKenzie Scott's Press Release on .Įmily Dickinson lived much of her life isolated in a single room, and I’ve found her poetry coming to me a lot this year.