Coronavirus Spring – Zeina Azzam

What I want to say to the tulips
that emerged, again, in March:
I am so grateful to count on you.
 
There is nothing else to gird me
anymore. This beauty almost
makes me weep.
 
Do you see how different
the world is now?
 
And they tell me: no,
as we know it, the world is still the same.
The rains arrived this morning.

The nightingale keeps working so hard
to sing. The starling wails.
 
If sickness comes
I want to be like the wise tulips,
store energy in my heart bulb
 
and come back after a hard winter,
dressed in bright turbans
of orange and yellow and red.
 
© Zeina Azzam 2020
First published in The New Verse News on March 30, 2020

Bio:

Zeina Azzam is a poet, editor, and community activist from Alexandria, Virginia. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Sukoon Magazine, Pleiades, Mizna, Split This Rock, Bettering American Poetry, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by Refugees, and Gaza Unsilenced. She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature.

Donation Appeal:

Throughout June and July, we will be presenting on this web site work by poets and artists responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope you will find these works relevant, comforting and inspiring as we all cope with the economic and health-related fallout.

As you view the work on this site each day, we would like to encourage you to donate to the Arlington Food Assistance Center (AFAC). Their mission “ is to feed our neighbors in need by providing dignified access to supplemental groceries. AFAC is seeing a record number of families due to the COVID-19 pandemic as families who never thought they would ever be in need are now showing up at our doors for much needed food.”  And, in keeping with our hunger-focused efforts, you may also want to visit the Poetry X Hunger website where poems by many poets are posted and are being used by anti-hunger organizations.”

Throughout June and July, we will be presenting on this web site work by poets and artists responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope you will find these works relevant, comforting and inspiring as we all cope with the economic and health-related fallout.

Please consider donating to AFAC. If you do, let us know which poet or artist inspired you so we can send you a personal thank you.

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