Sartre, prescient on #coronavirus:

“L’enfer, c’est les autres.”

Whether we infect others or get infected by the others.

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he
knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so
much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my
state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that: John Donne

Es machen sich die Fliegen
Ein luftig Tanzvergnügen.
Der Frosch, der denkt: Nur munter!
Ihr kommt schon noch herunter!

- Wilhelm Busch

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you."

- Khalil Gibran on social distancing...

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

- Sylvia Plath on plunging stock markets, Friday the 13th and doomsday stuff..

“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

- Albert Camus, on how the not-at-risk could be a #Covid19 carrier and should do handwashing & social-distancing

When I stand
On the front lines now,
Cussing the lack of truth,
The absence of willful change
And strategic coalitions,
I realize sewing quilts
Will not bring you back
Nor save us ...

- Essex Hemphill foresees (and laments) UK govt response on #coronavirus

Will there really be a "Morning"?
Is there such a thing as "Day"?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

- Emily Dickinson, not quite sure what day it is after #WFH became the norm and swallowed the weekends whole..

Small service is true service while it lasts:
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.

- Wordsworth, reminding us to do little acts of service for our housebound elderly neighbours

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

- WH Davies, anticipating what we really do when we try to channel this extra time at home into cleaning or organising our books

At home, the lamp curls its aurora
into the corners of the room
and out the windows
squares, rectangles of light
stake out a territory on the ragged lawn.

- Rachel Sherwood, describing what self-isolation feels like presumably in early days..

As the flu flies
What foolish things can we do
To stop people from getting the flu?

Stop what we are doing
That would be our death
Imagine not going to work
Play and rest?

- Nadalia Bagratuni, fielding YOLO arguments against self-isolation

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

- Philip Larkin, reminding us it is Monday after weekends and weekdays seem to dissolve into one another..

He has no nice felicities that shrink
From giant horrors; wildly wandering here,
He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know
The depth or the duration of his woe.

- Charlotte Smith gets the restlessness about staying home for an uncertain time, while allowed one walk a day

Storm Thorgerson foresees NHS Nightingale

“After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith,...”

- Marcel Proust, who understood cordon sanitaire better than most, reminding us to appreciate what we have now: time

Life is short,
and art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experimentations perilous,
and judgment difficult.

- Hippocrates (in translation obv.) on the #coronavirus situation. Make some art.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.

- Galway Kinnell nudges us through the next 3, 6mth

“Just because people throw it out and don't have any use for it, doesn't mean it's garbage.”

- Andy Warhol, trying to give us false assurances, while the council stops collecting recycling, and limits waste collection to food and non-recyclable rubbish.

"She said we were never feeling bored
'cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
and we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought then thought make amends."

- Neil Tennant cites Zelda F's perspective on being (not) bored in lockdown

He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.

- citing Langston Hughes on the day #coronavirus cruelly claimed Ellis Marsalis

Now vanquished, wisdom is my peril
My agony, my cries fall on forbidden ears
Their un-thoughtfulness proceeds in a creeping motion
Clapping, clapping...

-- Robert Sheridan on why instead of clapping, PM & health minister must provide PPE and tests to the NHS staff urgently

"April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go."

-- Christopher Morley calls it, explains why it needs to be reiterated that a sunny weekend is not an excuse for en masse loafing but that we must stay home.

We'll always be together
However far it seems
(Love never ends)
We'll always be together
Together in electric dreams.

— Oakley & Moroder remind us to do virtual catch-ups (they seem like dreams anyway!) with far-flung family & friends, while we #StayAtHome during #coronavirus

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

-- Wordsworth addresses all the feels we feel as we #StayAtHome (today's 250y since his birth!)

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don't know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

-- Warsan Shire might as well have been writing about the growth in #domesticviolence during #StayAtHome ..

Something light hearted for a change:

Sting on #SocialDistancing

Its not Monday anymore
... It is late, late into a
week of countless days
and the river bed
is turning to dust.

-- Suzy Jay, on the futility of "bank holiday Monday" after Easter when we are on week 4 of #coronavirus #lockdown

Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?
Memories I do not seize and bring inside.
O life! O living! O to be outside!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.

-- Rilke probably understood how it must feel to die in a care home (and not even be counted)..

René Magritte foresees coronavirus?

It's Friday and the #lockdown was extended yesterday in the UK for another three weeks. We can all do with a special 2-part poetry tweet today:

(1/2)
A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.

(2/2)
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.

-- Ogden Nash wouldn't make light of #coronavirus, nor should we.

A two-part midweek poem:

(1/2)
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.

(2/2)
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

-- Sylvia Plath understands all of us, ennui on a Mittwoch, amid continuing #coronavirus #lockdown

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he 's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

-- B'day boy Shakespeare, on incompetent leadership amid #coronavirus

Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these;—
But so much patience, as a blade of grass
Grows by contented through the heat and cold.

-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning knows how the #StayAtHome is beginning to feel...

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.

-- Shakespeare knew how April has felt without seeing our loved ones due to #StayAtHome

Come, ye rains, then if ye will,
May’s at home, and with me still;
But come rather, thou, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.

-- Leigh Hunt is all of us, still #StayAtHome but gawking expectantly at the plans for gradually opening up again.. (yes, it's May!)

We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day

-- Vera Lynn's song, on #VEDay75 and with hope swirling re opening up of lockdown..

One day is fine and next is black
So if you want me off your back
Well come on and let me know
Should I Stay or should I go?

-- The Clash is all of us after last night's address by PM Boris Johnson

"How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences."

- Camus knew we didn't prepare for #covid19

I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

-- Derek Mahon assures on a scorching sunny day amid #Covid19 but why read this when you can hear this beautiful recitation... https://twitter.com/kateforster/status/1262695883302305792?s=20

It's a sad, sad situation
And it's getting more and more absurd
It's sad, (so sad) so sad
Why can't we talk it over?
Oh, it seems to me
That sorry seems to be the hardest word..

- Elton John has #DominicCummings's number!

The Past and Present here unite
Beneath Time's flowing tide,
Like footprints hidden by a brook,
But seen on either side.

-- Longfellow feels for us all on a sunny Mittwoch in the nth week of #StayHome ..

A 3-part addition to this thread seeing the resistance to accountability in handling of the #covid19 saga: (1/3)

I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

(2/3)
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you...

(3/3)
It doesn't walk in saying,
"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution."

-- Michael Rosen, who is thankfully now recovered from #Covid19, presciently in 2014 worried about boiling frogs...

"Mother, should I trust the government?"

-- Pink Floyd asking the question most in the UK are asking as mixed messages keep coming about the risks of reopening and the spread of #Covid19

Orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages
And the zoo keeper is very fond of rum.
Zebras are reactionaries,
Antelopes are missionaries.
Pigeons plot in secrecy
And hamsters turn on frequently.

-- Simon & Garfunkel hear UK zoos will open 15 June as #StayHome ends

The Police (not that police!) are wary of the review of the 2m rule ordered by the PM Boris Johnson...

#SocialDistancing #COVID19 #2m

Pet Shop Boys on contract awards which @GeorgeMonbiot writes about today:

It's easy when you got all the information
Inside help, no investigation
No questions in the house, no give and take
There's a big bang in the city
We're all on the make

#COVID19

A multipart thread aka Yeats on A Statesman's Holiday:

I lived among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank.
No Oscar ruled the table,
But I'd a troop of friends
That knowing better talk had gone
Talked of odds and ends.

2/n

Some knew what ailed the world
But never said a thing,
So I have picked a better trade
And night and morning sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.

Am I a great Lord Chancellor
That slept upon the Sack?
Commanding officer that tore
The khaki from his back?

3/n

Or am I de Valera,
Or the King of Greece,
Or the man that made the motors?
Ach, call me what you please!

Here's a Montenegrin lute,
And its old sole string
Makes me sweet music
And I delight to sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.

4/n

With boys and girls about him.
With any sort of clothes,
With a hat out of fashion,
With Old patched shoes,
With a ragged bandit cloak,
With an eye like a hawk,
With a stiff straight back,
With a strutting turkey walk.

5/n where n=5

With a bag full of pennies,
With a monkey on a chain,
With a great cock's feather,
With an old foul tune.
Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon.

Pink Floyd, prescient on the multifaceted incompetence in handling #Covid19..

//Well I've always had a deep respect
And I mean that most sincerely
The band is just fantastic
That is really what I think
Oh by the way, which one's Pink?//

//If I live or die
So I might as well begin
To put some action in my life
Breaking the law, breaking the law...//

Judas Priest feels the confusion as #RuleOfSix kicks in but frustrates with the complexity around it...

As a second round of stimulus (sort of) is announced in the UK, the talk turns to #CovidEconomy.

Theodore Roethke warns us of The Reckoning..

//All profits disappear: the gain
Of ease, the hoarded, secret sum;
And now grim digits of old pain
Return to litter up our home.//

As many around me (and I!) get antsy about further #Covid19 restrictions on meeting people, I think Jay Kay called it right and early..

//And now it's virtual insanity
Forget your virtual reality//

“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.”

— as far back as 1972, Seamus Heaney had advice for how to deal with festive season and winter in 2020, with the pandemic raging...

Hard frost, stuck Brexit talks, confusion about vaccines, Simon & Garfunkel nail the UK:

I am a rock
I am an island

I've built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
Its laughter and its loving I disdain..

And even as we see the oncoming challenges..

And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries

("This according to Arty is my most neurotic song.")

Between #Covid19 and #Brexit deal-or-no-deal, British folk waiting for the end of 2020 be like...

"Hang on a minute, lads, I've got a great idea!"

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
(Richard Wilbur)

Reviving this thread as I watch people handwring over why Labour lost Hartlepool:

Do you want the truth or something beautiful?
Just close your eyes and make believe
Do you want the truth or something beautiful?
I am happy to deceive you..