Digital Kingston

Bruce Kauffman shares his pandemic poem

In the spring of 2020 Kingston Poet Laureate Jason Heroux and the City of Kingston started a project entitled Poetry in the Time of a Pandemic. Kingston poets were commissioned to write an original poem capturing the local human spirit as people went through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jason's own poem “All People” launched the project, and it was posted to the KFPL Poetry Blackboard in May. Bruce Kauffman's “this morning” was the next poem, posted on June 1.

Watch the Blackboard on July 2 for the next poem, from Sadiqa de Meijer,, and on August 1 and September 1 for poetry from Eric Folsom and Alyssa Cooper.

this morning
          weeks into the 2020 pandemic

even early this morning
in these days of
only computer screens
screen's flesh
          not soft to the touch
          but index finger against -
                    still slightly warm
and a divided comatose pulse
between it and me         it and us
          them and us
          us and us and us and us
but screen's inaudible heartbeat
          will connect us still
          will hold each a hand when
                    there are no hands to hold

today while there are still whispers
          we will whisper, yes
          this too shall pass
and that whisper will first be lost
          then found
behind the locked doors of an untold
million other echoes, the same
          welling behind

and we will all practice
until that sound becomes low enough
          soft enough
that even then that most gentle language
of silence will recognize
its quiet hum
          almost music         almost word

that same hum translated
          proclaimed once
in an oldest of language —

     This first day after all the trees of the world
     were meant to, but did not, fall.
                    We shall forever call 'Today'.

Bruce wrote: “I was asked to include a short statement about this poem. Asked to write about what or why or how it was written. I can only say that as I sat down to begin to write the poem in my journal, I'd turned off my computer – and there was this starting image – during this period of isolation, all of us of late on our computers all the time. And many of us alone in it.”

"For the past twenty-five years, at least, of my writing life, after discovering the process for writing I still use today, and what I call 'intuitive writing', I have let go of feeling that I am the 'creator' of my poetry – but instead the transcriber, the conduit, the pen itself. It's as if the poems 'arrive' when I am quiet enough to receive them. In this particular poem, I felt the strong as if presence of my favourite, now deceased poet, W. S. Merwin. My edits in this, I believe, were cutting those lines of cleverness, my own – and allowing simply the voice of the muse to remain.”