Renga Spring 2020

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Crocus, primroses,

in locked-down Square Léopold- 

Achille. The plague spring.

Rana sent me a photo

of police on Hamra Street

enforcing curfew.

The boy I watched on the roof 

of the refugee

squat was locked down already,

daily, among washing lines.

— MH, 29 March 2020

Daily lines burgeon

on Louis Blanc pavements, each sprout 

five feet from the next:

Human un-blossoms outside

baker-butcher-grocers’ doors.

One out for one in;

gloved, masked, sanitized before

and after each yield.

The pigeons strutting the same

sidewalks heed no distancing.  

— KN, 30 March 2020

“Distance between us…”

she wrote long ago, and then

made it permanent.

Charpentier Vêpres à la Vierge
(while I’m doing the dishes)

on the comforting

old squat black CD player:

for a moment, there’s

connection, if only with 
that perplexed self, desiring. 

— MH, 30 March 2020

The desire for self

to be more, more than terra

firma for virus

settlements begets fresh creeds.

Parisians grunt and wheeze praise

to Lord Jogging, while

roaming forlorn as our streets.

Romans hymn and drum

Volare from balconies.

Jack Bernhardt downs ten thousand,

yes, minutes of Bones —
libation of eyes and wits

to fair Agent Booth.

The right mantra for lúc lắc

spurs my quest across the ’Net.

— KN, 31 March 2020

Across the street, a

girl stands lengthily at the

window, smoking and

looking at empty sidewalks,

sun-soaked on April first.

I wished the tourists

would disappear. Now they’re gone.

Watch what you wish for!

In purdah, in quarantine,

I dice one more aubergine.

— MH, 1 April 2020

Aubergine, once more —

braised, bhartha-ed, basil-and-beef-

fried … in any form:

The thought invades aurous noons,

leaves sharp pugmarks on my dreams 

these still-wintry nights.

Preschoolers play COVID-age

tag in our courtyard:

Not more than two at a time,

and “catch” with an out-flung glove. 

— KN,  3 April 2020

We drove out to the

place they called Karantina

where crews of ships from

Europe once waited forty

days to be declared plague-free.

Desolate still, but

in a lonely high-rise, in

a vast gallery,

the ninety-year-old painter’s

new gouaches, texts, tapestries.

Afterward, a huge

Armenian lunch in Bourj

Hammoud with my two

young friends: nobody knew the

quarantine was just starting. 

— MH, 3 April 2020

Bedlam just started
here, N writes from New Delhi’s

migrant-worker camps.

How will they lockdown millions

who have neither doors nor roof?

Millions who must walk

many moons to reach a home

to self-isolate.

Prime Minister Modi bids

his nation to light candles.

President Macron, 

meanwhile, warned us off facemasks

unless really ill.

Spring: the dearth, in my two lands,

of roses for all the graves. 

— KN, 4 April 2020

Rose garden hidden

in the Square du Grand Veneur —

it’s starting to bud,

but the gates are locked, only

kids from the logements sociaux

in the enclosure

peer through the grates, in strange

bright April sunlight.

Here’s a petition against 

euthanizing the sick old.

— MH, 5 April 2020

Sick and old: for Laure

and Serge, teens from Block D, I

now tick both boxes.

L — four-inch heels keen across 

cobblestones — rushes to hold

open all our doors.

Their mom, though, no longer hails

me with nod and smile:

Chemo-shorn, browless beings

in masks could spell one more germ. 

— KN, 6 April 2020

One more spell, one more

incantation — it’s only

“The Art of the Fugue”

or Hildegard of Bingen

or Alice Coltrane: music

mutes anxiety.

Abida Parveen sings

a Hafez ghazal

cross-legged, eloquent hands. …

I pick out a word or two. 

— MH, 6 April 2020 

Two words, now, for me:

Hum dekhenge — We shall see. 

Iqbal Bano soars

skyward on Faiz’s refrain, and

something steelier than hope

lights the heart once more.

Heart that fluttered last evening,

stalled a few instants:

a frog in the throat these days

hearkens to beasts less winsome.

— KN, 9 April 2020

Ego, clawing beast:

with or without our selfhood, 
beasts try to survive,

as does each isolate “I,”

newly dispensable, or

in the equation.

Lock up these, those, forever,

then open the doors.

I open late windows on

unnatural bright April. 

— MH, 10 April 2020

Bright as this April

Isa, flushed after cycling

from Pantin — risking

dour fines we none can afford—

brings me dorayaki, home-

made with sweet red beans

crushed and flour ground by Nico,

who’d foraged for weeks.

Balm for my bile-deluged gut,

swaddling for sleep-deprived dreams.

Wajdi Mouawad writes

to his infant, unknowing

son “Quoi dire de plus

urgent que l’amour ?” Sometimes,

pancakes will do just as well.

— KN, 13 April 2020

Pancakes, not huîtres,

phone calls, texts, instead of wine-

flavored exchanges

in the public privacy

of a café. Sautéed snow

peas, shallots, chicken,

wine anyway, but for one,

yesterday’s bread, a 

departing moon above roof-

dormers, now my horizon.

— MH, 14 April 2020

My horizon, each

week: the poppy-printed, teal

hair cap of Nurse Rose

(handstitched, the florets for cheer)

as she disinfects — “secures,”

in the martial cant

so dear to our president – 

my port-a-cath site.

She, of calm hands and raptor

gaze, snags any truant vein. 

— KN, 15 April 2020

I play truant when

I go to the bakery,

or Russian roulette

for a baguette tradition,

une réglette de macarons. 

I should be indoors.

Back inside I’m dizzy with

fear, but I eat one,

two, caramel macaroons.

“Look, we have come through?” Who knows? 

— MH, 15 April 2020

Who knows anything today?

Prefects, priests, pressmen,

physicians … no one. 

Yet, wait, everyone we know,

or don’t, dons shades of prophet. 

Sun-drenched flowed the Quais 

de Valmy and de Jemmapes

these last afternoons

while I brooded indoors with

Coke as cure and company.

— KN, 18 April 2020

Wolves accompany

me, a dream I’d like to have,

lope across a steppe

howl an ode to the half-moon,

break bread with al-Farazdaq,

hunt mice if we must.

Overarching, the night sky

blankets the city

we’re immured in, or opens

it up to ghazals of rain. 

— MH, 19 April 2020

A rain of ghazals,

petrichor from verse by long-

lost poets, crumble

many saber-toothed daymares,

if just for a rainbow while.

Ghālib, Faiz, Firaq,

Sahir (always Sahir), then

the doyen, Khushru:

sufi, secular or plain

kafir, their ghazal, nazm and 

sher the first to strike

my early, unlearned ears;

demand rebellion

yet earn adoration from 

a resolute nastik heart. 

— KN, 20 April 2020

My atheist heart’s

an impatient physician,

has no words to calm

vertigoes, palpitations

provoked by a sentence in

a news brief, or just

the sameness of spring days that

lengthen, out of reach.

No words then, music, numbers

and feeling, metal, thoughts, reeds:

oud, violin or

saxophone, behind them

a mind, hands, a mouth

unseen as a friend’s face now.

Today, the doctor’s Mozart. 

— MH, 21 April 2020

My doctors Bourrat

and Blazy — Amazons with

spines of carbon steel,

shafts marked truth and solace,

fingers the envy of neat

goldsmiths — take the time

to write and ring, enquire

and devise relief,

with bad puns, in pandemics,

covering for painkillers.

— KN, 23 April 2020

Covering her face

with the mask she’ll wear all night,

my daughter goes to

meet the patient first in the

queue: midnight in the ER.

Through nights in Aceh

after the tsunami, in

a hospital tent

she saw herself back in school,

saw herself the physician.

I imagined her

then, now, at a different

distance, think of her

unmasking in the morning,

driving home to walk the dogs.

— MH, 23 April 2020

Home with the dogs — four —

and spouse of five-odd decades,

my dad (veteran

of three wars; child, too, of World

War II, famines, a blood-steeped

Partition) thunders

at the virus, the lockdown,

the distance from kin …

the years of command futile

before this covert agent. 

— KN, 24 April 2020

Before, I covered 
my head to enter a mosque.

I cover my face

now, to go down to the street.

Niqab’s forbidden in France,

but masks like the one

the kiné gave me will be

obligatory.

I sent a photo of my

solo atheist Iftar

to Samira in 
Algiers, to Maryam in

London. Next year will

we sit down together to

break bread for anyone’s feast? 

— MH, 26 April 2020

Stale bread, feast for one

gleaning breath from rotting peel

and near-empty cans

of red beans from garbage bins

around the local Monop’.

Streets abandoned by

traffic and pedestrians

find homes with vagrants.

Vagrants left unfed, unsafe,

even as the cops slap fines 

on their unhoused hands,

and leaders applaud our state-

wide lockdown success.

Some deaths never figure, not

even as nameless figures. 

— KN, 28 April 2020

Known, nameless faces,

figures, throw open windows

up and down the street

each night at eight to applaud

doctors, nurses, éboueurs,

and to show ourselves

to each other at the end

of a locked-in day

I wave to the girl in the

fifth-floor dormer; she waves back.

— MH, 29 April 2020

Her sixth-floor dormer,

a cigarette, the much-loved

view of our skyline:

Claire — critical-care intern —

sighs for one, after twenty

hours on breathless feet.

Evening applause is sweet, but

she’d choose PPE

over the President’s praise —

and eggs on grocery shelves.

— KN, 1 May 2020

Shelves in the G-20

are still filled with coffee, cheese,

brown eggs, gariguettes,

Greek yoghurt, milk, wine — but I

hurry, forget tomatoes,

get out of harm’s way

(masked, gloved) as fast as I can.

Food shopping once was

community, communion.

Poison in the chalice now. 

— MH, 2 May 2020

In my chalice, now,

on good days: mouthful of fresh

cirrus and sapphire,

sometimes nimbus, with falling

sheets of vitreous heaven.

That daily ramble,

required to expel Taxol

and its unkind ilk,

impossible alone, yet

forbidden in company.

Once more, Doctor B

rides to the rescue, handing

armor to my knights:

Isa, Nico, Claire, Philippe

bear her letterhead as shield.  

— KN, 4 May 2020

A facemask as shield,

or he hopes so, bearing wine

and some news, Hisham walks

along the Corniche, open

now, toward Raouché,

his mother’s flat, where

he hasn’t been in three months.

Scholarship, maybe,

fall term in London, maybe.

Freekeh bidajaj tonight.

— MH, 4 May 2020

Tonight, an empire

of pain reigns over attempts

to write, think; to be.

Fall, even summer, graze past

ears as would submerged boulders.

RDEB — four 

horseless, shapeless, ageless words —

must play first fiddle;

second, third, and last as well

while all others earn exile.

— KN, 5 May 2020

Home becomes exile

in the punished city. Leaves

green beyond grillwork,

Nâzım Hikmet’s postcard from

prison poems on the sill.

Locked-in lovers make

love until it bores them. Once

through a hurricane

in Crete … but that was three days,

decades ago, two of us.

— MH, 7 May 2020

This, decades ago,

was how I gaped at the sea.

Reaching Rue Manin,

the years sublime, suddenly-

much-younger selves drink from this

downpour of gloaming,

we gasp at the carnival

corralled within Parc

des Buttes-Chaumont. Cedar, elm

and linden, pine, plane, and beech,

arch toward the sky;

hazelnut and cherry trees

flaunt wanton blossoms;

and the cascades underground

serenade us from afar.

— KN, 8 May 2020

From afar, but it

wasn’t, thunder, rush of dark

clouds, then crash of rain,

just after I noticed, no

gates blocked the berges of the Île

Saint-Louis. No way

but, run under the rain,

no café shelter.

Strip off once indoors, shower.

Flu, or worse, I’m on my own.

Later, on my own,

I slice shallots and mushrooms

into olive oil

and begin to imagine

I might not cough tomorrow. 

— MH, 9 May 2020

Tomorrow might bring

the unknown — new foes, allies

of Taxol; blitzkrieg

within the chest; skull afire

(the mind sentinels one front

alone, these days) — but 
also Philippe, bonne fée; by

the hospital doors,

strafed by showers or barraged — 
joyfully — by vernal sun. 

— KN, 12 May 2020

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Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015).

Karthika Naïr is the author of several books, including the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata (American edition: Archipelago Books, 2019).