Who is your mercy contact?, Ronna Bloom
Espresso, 2022
The first poem, “Vows,” begins with an honest voice: “I courted emptiness for ten years/and it suddenly married me.” There are birds “flying through me,” then, but when the speaker hears of how many other birds have perished “smashing into windows,” she says, that it “only makes me/all the more certain of my vows.” The poems in this collection sometimes speak of solitude, loneliness, and the fear that gripped everyone around the world at the start of the global pandemic.
In “On going to the carnival,” Bloom writes of the closure of the Venice Carnival because of quarantine: “Stoic the faces of the gondoliers who disinfect boats,/then send emojis with wide scared eyes.” Prepared for flooding in Venice, servers in outdoor cafes “know to lift the chairs before/the water comes,” but “no one can dress for this.” First encounters and experiences with the coronavirus were a bit surreal, and Bloom conveys this in some of these poems.
The pieces from that early wave of hysteria are bleak and evocative of a specific place in our history as humans. In “Holy Week,” the poet writes: “Wednesday my sister had a Seder and read the plagues/without a hint of irony. I ate a frozen dinner at home.” By Good Friday, “it was reported nurses everywhere/had the taste of death in their mouths.” The sense of impending doom, isolation, and loneliness is poignant in “Immeasurable,” when a woman walking down the street looking for an open butcher shop tears up at the cinematic strangeness of a too quiet city. Bloom writes: “Some of us/looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes,/others looking up, sending out our million help me messages.” Thinking back to that time, when we washed our oranges and eggs, these visual images seem both surreal and unsettling. The world is different now, but just as strangely off kilter.
In disconnection, Bloom seems to suggest in her work, we can still find the points where we can discover connections. These places of connection aren’t always as obvious as they once were, before the virus arrived, but perhaps we are more finely attuned to their quiet—yet momentous—arrival in our lives. At a moment when news of a friend’s death arrives, in “When I heard you’d died,” Bloom writes: “I got up/and lay on the grass, saw nothing but earth/held me as it will you.” Then, in “I used to know,” the poet speaks about how it used to feel comfortable to speak to people. In a pandemic, she “sits with everyone/in the big asklessness, waiting/for birds to fly out of our mouths.” Loss comes dressed in different pieces of clothing, sometimes with grief at the death of a person we’ve loved, or someone whose path has diverged from ours for reasons we can never understand, or because of a pandemic lockdown that keeps us in bubbles with pets, or people, or both.
The final poem, “Prayer,” sings with a hopeful voice. It follows “Service,” a poem that speaks to the way in which “doctors are writing poetry” and “poets are listening/to the stories of soldiers. The soldiers/are changing the sheets of the aged.” While all this happens, in pandemic years, “The aged are dying as trumpetlessly as ever.” In the face of sadness and despair, in a world that’s too often populated by fear and war, poetry offers us a source of light. Bloom’s chapbook is, in so many ways, a very good ‘mercy contact’ in such difficult times.
