Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? I am nurse and I wrote this poem in March of 2020, a few days after the Covid pandemic was officially declared by the World Health Organization. I was thinking about our personal protective equipment when I wrote this poem. I wanted it to be fragmented, scattered, and disembodied, just as our faces appear to others when wearing masks.
Click on the below link to visit the World Health Organization’s website
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was at home, on my day off, when I first conceived of the idea for this poem. I wrote it at my kitchen table over breakfast with my two Boxers asleep at my feet.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I was fortunate to write this piece in one sitting and in one draft. The completed poem is its first and only version.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I hope readers will take from this poem the perplexity of the masked face. When I first wrote it I was thinking of healthcare workers in PPE, however, as we all know, ultimately everyone was wearing masks everywhere. What a polystyrene, gloved, and cotton cloth world it has become. We need to realize how disembodied we appear to others and how our eyes, when left uncovered, become a gift.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The most emotional part of this poem for me was the word only. As a caregiver I felt the limits of what I could give my patients most acutely in the early days of the pandemic. We were short on PPE. We didn’t have a good sense of what Covid-19 was yet or how to treat it. All wrapped up in a sea of blue plastic we rolled into their treatment rooms. Sometimes the most I could offer was my verbal reassurance and my eyes.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? This poem was published in the American Journal of Nursing in April of 2020.
https://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/toc/2020/04000
Click below to read about Stacy Nigliazzo.
https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/stacy_nigliazzo
Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html