Spring 2020, the Covid 19 virus declared its war to conquer every continent. This pandemic was a world-wide tragedy of historic proportions. I wrote one villanelle per day during the San Francisco Bay Area’s shelter-in-place 3/16/2020 to 5/3/2020. This year, Persephone did not come back from the underworld, Spring Maiden did not bring spring to us. I searched all over for her; I ran and ran like Forrest Gump…
Yes, we suffered, we witnessed deaths and the picture of what death is like; we tried to grasp a prescient glimpse of our future, strived to go back to normal living, longed for healing and to make sense out of that calamitous catastrophe. These poems are Livingston’s diary to reflect the day-to-day headlines, dialogs, debates, feelings, pathos…it is a tiny, humble reaction to the ongoing debacles. An ancient form of villanelle was chosen to compose these poems to parallel the plaques over centuries of archaic human history.
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