(Like many of us, I’m still getting over sickness, so I’m sorry in advance if this isn’t the most coherent or insightful post.)

I adored these poems. The two that struck me most were actually two of the additional poems Professor Gillespie emailed us (which I hope I’m allowed to talk about here!)

He tries to tell her about the giraffe, its stunning beauty and grace, its élan. The passage in which he describes it does seem life-affirming, does seem like it might have the power to lift sadness.

But it won’t work:

“But you have been breathing this slumberous fog much too long,
You wil not believe, not in anything, save for the rain.”

His listener has been breathing the “slumberous fog” of Russia for such a long time that it is impossible for her to envision any other reality. Still, he ends by repeating his first line about the giraffe as she weeps—although he know it won’t help, he knows that she is lost in the mist so the words about Africa mean nothing to her. But he repeats them anyway, perhaps because he doesn’t know what else to do.

And perhaps this poem is still so striking here and now because those circumstances are not unique to Africa and Russia. All of us know what it’s like to be so immersed in our current sadness that we can’t believe in anything else, that stories about a different brighter world are fantastical and useless.