Current Event Poems
Poems about what's happening in your world, big and small.
Have you been writing as the coronavirus sweeps around the world, into your state, city, neighborhood? As the nation grapples with crisis after crisis? OPN encourages you to share your words with your fellow poets and other readers here. Though we're in forced isolation, the more we share our feelings about all this craziness, the more we'll realize we're all in this together, now more than ever. Poetry can help us all maintain our sanity.
Use the submission form below.
Use the submission form below.
Guidelines
- You must be a paid member in good standing to submit. Join OPN online or via mail HERE.
- Poems must be "publish-ready," meaning the formatting is all set to go. We cannot reproduce color or specialized fonts.
- We invite you to comment on your poem. What, in particular, inspired it?
- Please send no more than three submissions at a time, uploaded in a Word file. We reserve the right to select which ones get published.
- Submit as frequently as you like. There are a lot of thoughts out there. Share yours freely.
- If your poem has been previously published, please list where and when at the end of the poem.
- Above all, stay healthy and safe.
Caveats
All members should understand that publishing a poem on the OPN website constitutes publication in the eyes of many literary journals and magazines. Publication here may disqualify your piece for publication elsewhere. All poems printed here are copyrighted, and are the property of the poet. No reproduction without written permission from the poet.
Judith Bushell
Surviving Turbulence
Nature has much to teach us if we listen.
Birds wait out high winds in protected thickets.
They build their nests in safe environs.
Ducks dive below the crest of breaking waves
to avoid the violence of crashing water.
We can shield ourselves from negative chatter
by choosing to let it flow off our backs.
Fog horns sound to warn ships away from danger.
Beware which horn you lend your attention to.
The loudest sound may not hold the truest note.
When the awful noise becomes too much
the tendency is to retreat from the world.
The answer is to become more engaged,
not by being a funnel of dark, divisive rhetoric,
but a source of light for truth and common good.
We need to connect with each other and stay
connected because we are all in this together.
Let us be together while we are in it.
Nature has much to teach us if we listen.
Birds wait out high winds in protected thickets.
They build their nests in safe environs.
Ducks dive below the crest of breaking waves
to avoid the violence of crashing water.
We can shield ourselves from negative chatter
by choosing to let it flow off our backs.
Fog horns sound to warn ships away from danger.
Beware which horn you lend your attention to.
The loudest sound may not hold the truest note.
When the awful noise becomes too much
the tendency is to retreat from the world.
The answer is to become more engaged,
not by being a funnel of dark, divisive rhetoric,
but a source of light for truth and common good.
We need to connect with each other and stay
connected because we are all in this together.
Let us be together while we are in it.
Cynthia Pratt
Meetings In The Time Of Coronavirus
With an apology to
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Everything now begins shutting down,
even my cellphone with my electronic hotel key.
Three hotel clerks later disagree
whether I’m registered at the hotel
for the rest of the six days,
even though one had reassured our City
assistant that talked to the hotel directly that they
needed to register me twice because of a glitch
of an online conference application.
They said I could stay in the same room.
Three times they told me they would move my
registration back to Room 5070 where my clothes hang.
My electronic room key still doesn’t work each time.
Everything is cancelled on my email. Our City sends out
notices that the Cultural Festival won’t occur:
All the vendors and dancers believe disease will float
in the air down I-5, attack the music, intertwine with the beats.
My smartphone electronic key succumbs. Has a fever.
Confused, it won’t give me an electronic key.
Keeps questioning me if I’m really registered.
The hotel finally gives me an actual card to open my room.
Another dinner event flashes on my email, cancelled,
which gets put on a list of dead before arrival events:
Cultural Festival
Audubon Dinner
The Y Fundraiser
I add Nisqually Annual Fundraiser. Shall I add March’s
Poetry reading?
The TV blares the primary totals.
I just had my birthday, realize I still am younger
than the Presidential Candidates, barely.
Are we at risk together? Passion about the primaries,
but all of us dead anyway, whatever age we are.
Safe right now, I think, but well over fifty, and my conference
is still on. Although no bag for our items, just free hand
sanitizer and a slim conference booklet.
I’m forced to buy a fancy backpack purse
to put the hand sanitizer and the booklet in, and
my afflicted phone, but still feel well and optimistic.
Sanitizer is now costing $40 in some stores,
and maybe more now,
and the handbag I will store the free
sanitizer in only costs
twice as much. Plus, it is designer pink.
An acquaintance I met at the bar last night,
over wine and “small bites”
said now is the time to buy stock. I think
wine makes you think of what could be
rather than now.
The Washington Department of Health have
diagnosed 102 people with COVID-19 people
as of March 8, with a state population of 7 million.
That seems doable. Still,
Please don’t shake my hand.
Please don’t sit too close.
Bow, tap my elbow with yours,
and if it’s morning and I’m still agile,
let’s tap our feet, one by one, together.
Love without touching, without meeting,
without hugging. Love from afar.
And for heaven’s sake, go on living,
no matter how we manage it because
this, too, will pass, and we must be ready
for whatever is left.
With an apology to
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Everything now begins shutting down,
even my cellphone with my electronic hotel key.
Three hotel clerks later disagree
whether I’m registered at the hotel
for the rest of the six days,
even though one had reassured our City
assistant that talked to the hotel directly that they
needed to register me twice because of a glitch
of an online conference application.
They said I could stay in the same room.
Three times they told me they would move my
registration back to Room 5070 where my clothes hang.
My electronic room key still doesn’t work each time.
Everything is cancelled on my email. Our City sends out
notices that the Cultural Festival won’t occur:
All the vendors and dancers believe disease will float
in the air down I-5, attack the music, intertwine with the beats.
My smartphone electronic key succumbs. Has a fever.
Confused, it won’t give me an electronic key.
Keeps questioning me if I’m really registered.
The hotel finally gives me an actual card to open my room.
Another dinner event flashes on my email, cancelled,
which gets put on a list of dead before arrival events:
Cultural Festival
Audubon Dinner
The Y Fundraiser
I add Nisqually Annual Fundraiser. Shall I add March’s
Poetry reading?
The TV blares the primary totals.
I just had my birthday, realize I still am younger
than the Presidential Candidates, barely.
Are we at risk together? Passion about the primaries,
but all of us dead anyway, whatever age we are.
Safe right now, I think, but well over fifty, and my conference
is still on. Although no bag for our items, just free hand
sanitizer and a slim conference booklet.
I’m forced to buy a fancy backpack purse
to put the hand sanitizer and the booklet in, and
my afflicted phone, but still feel well and optimistic.
Sanitizer is now costing $40 in some stores,
and maybe more now,
and the handbag I will store the free
sanitizer in only costs
twice as much. Plus, it is designer pink.
An acquaintance I met at the bar last night,
over wine and “small bites”
said now is the time to buy stock. I think
wine makes you think of what could be
rather than now.
The Washington Department of Health have
diagnosed 102 people with COVID-19 people
as of March 8, with a state population of 7 million.
That seems doable. Still,
Please don’t shake my hand.
Please don’t sit too close.
Bow, tap my elbow with yours,
and if it’s morning and I’m still agile,
let’s tap our feet, one by one, together.
Love without touching, without meeting,
without hugging. Love from afar.
And for heaven’s sake, go on living,
no matter how we manage it because
this, too, will pass, and we must be ready
for whatever is left.
Patrick Dixon
Undertaker
This spring
I am an undertaker.
I close the casket on travel,
dig holes in the back yard,
toss in plays, poetry readings,
concerts, frivolous trips to the grocery,
the Farmer’s Market.
I mourn my favorite restaurants,
distrust the handle that dispenses
gasoline into my car. But though
the price of gas has dropped,
I’m not driving much.
I miss my beloved coffee shops,
the friends I’d meet there,
the conversations dipped into
as I wrote in my journal.
I miss relaxing in public.
I carry dread with me these days
like a scythe. It shows in my eyes
whenever someone sneezes or coughs
and I hold my breath as I leave.
No one says Bless You anymore.
We duck and scurry like the rats we are,
at the mercy of the fleas we carry.
I’m even reluctant to hug my own children.
The fear has changed my posture,
hands stuffed into pockets,
shoulders hunched, arms tight
as if I can fend off this unseen threat
if I hunker deep enough into my coat
deep enough into myself.
I am an undertaker all right,
scattered pieces of me
strewn everywhere.
All that’s left to do
is carve a headstone.
– March, 2020
This poem was first published on the website Poetry to Lean On, curated by Claudia Castro Luna, the current Washington State Poet Laureate.
This spring
I am an undertaker.
I close the casket on travel,
dig holes in the back yard,
toss in plays, poetry readings,
concerts, frivolous trips to the grocery,
the Farmer’s Market.
I mourn my favorite restaurants,
distrust the handle that dispenses
gasoline into my car. But though
the price of gas has dropped,
I’m not driving much.
I miss my beloved coffee shops,
the friends I’d meet there,
the conversations dipped into
as I wrote in my journal.
I miss relaxing in public.
I carry dread with me these days
like a scythe. It shows in my eyes
whenever someone sneezes or coughs
and I hold my breath as I leave.
No one says Bless You anymore.
We duck and scurry like the rats we are,
at the mercy of the fleas we carry.
I’m even reluctant to hug my own children.
The fear has changed my posture,
hands stuffed into pockets,
shoulders hunched, arms tight
as if I can fend off this unseen threat
if I hunker deep enough into my coat
deep enough into myself.
I am an undertaker all right,
scattered pieces of me
strewn everywhere.
All that’s left to do
is carve a headstone.
– March, 2020
This poem was first published on the website Poetry to Lean On, curated by Claudia Castro Luna, the current Washington State Poet Laureate.