Be Wary of the Elderly
Poems By Allan Appel
Finishing Line Press
Remember the pandemic?
When we eyed the Stop & Shopper who seemed cavalier by pushing his cart too close to ours?
In a new poetry book Allan Appel reminds us what that was like — how we scanned the aisles for the customer “likely to take your life” amid the masked and gloved “thieves” grabbing boxes of Cheerios.
Adapting the mission of reportage to the tools of the poet, Allan reminds us of not just the facts of the pandemic’s trajectory — six-foot distancing, sheltering at home, emerging for that first vaccine shot — but the feeling. He captures the possibility that comes with a new chance at life thanks to the miracle of a new RNA-based formula. A new metaphorical “shot,” as Appel put it in a poem after he joined other seniors for the first round of Covid-19 in Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium:
I saw an old friend walk with cane and stoop
Beneath an inviting basketball hoop
Another peered at me above his mask
His names eluded me, both first and last
Yet he seemed to know where I lived, and wished me well
And I right back to him, for, strange to tell
The whole gymnasium where young people usually play
Was full of ambling, forgetful folks on vaccination day
Backboards folded neatly above, nets still and white as snow
Today the shots were taken down below
Yet as they monitored, no, guarded me in my white folding chair
I could not have been the only one there
Looking for his spot with this, my fervent wish
Pass me the ball, one last arcing shot, one more swish.
Allan called the poem “Vaccination Sonnet.” It was one of many he wrote for the Independent as a deadline “pandemic poet” at the same time he was filing his regular prose news articles as an Independent staff reporter. (Objectivity alert: I assigned Allan to write the poems as part of our pandemic coverage and have known and valued his friendship for decades, thus the departure for our style guide’s use of last names on second reference.)
Allan has collected pandemic poems along with other verses in a newly published collection called Be Wary of the Elderly (Finishing Line Press), his third book of verses (on top of eight novels, four nonfiction books, and too many Independent articles to count).
Republished years after the shutdown (it feels like decades), Allan’s pandemic poems read differently from the way they did at the time, especially grouped together with other poems rather than as one-shot “articles” amid news pieces. There’s value in revisiting intense disruptions to our lives rather than moving on like they never happened. In reading these poems, we remember the uncertainty, the fear of trying to navigate a mortal threat that officials did not yet understand, the rituals or preventive measures we clung to, the ways we viewed people around us, how (as in his poem about arranging six Adirondack chairs in anticipation of a socially distanced outdoor visit) we found ways to maintain connections to others. How we also discovered new joys in nature or in quietude and reconsidered our reasons for living in ways that the frenetic pace of non-pandemic daily life can crush. Allan’s rhythmic, ruminative, sometimes rhyming reflections return us to the time with the benefit of distance, helping us process the past in order to glide soulfully, sometimes solitarily, sometimes in step with our fellow seekers, into the future.
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with writer/poet Allan Appel on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
