Pueblo Library Poetry Month Contest Winner: Edith Edson
Edith entered the Pueblo Library Poetry Contest and was selected as a winner. Below is the poem she submitted, titled “Unprecedented Year of Despair”.
Unprecedented Year of Despair
Year 2020 was
Unprecedented in its totality,
But not in its component parts.
Someone who lived long enough,
Has born witness to
Never before challenges.
Poverty, stalking
Lives turned topsy-turvy by
Economic downturns or storms.
Responded to with food pantries,
Soup kitchens to serve homeless,
Jobless in endless, despairing lines,
Brutality, the issue slicing through
Birmingham, Kent State, Wounded Knee;
And hundreds of other sites, long forgotten,
Except by victims and their families.
Wars snatching lives from families,
Grenades and IEDs shattering limbs,
Horror reverberating through dreams.
Shortages and rationing diminishing
Quality of living for those left behind
To tend the farm, take care of kids alone.
School closings, disrupting learning and
Activities already halted by wildfires, mudslides,
Tornados, or hurricanes,
Students forced to adapt to chaos, confusion.
Unprecedented p.2
Disease, the enemy, laying siege to freedom
Since the pandemic of 1918 and before,
Scarlet fever quarantining children,
Making them destroy cherished toys.
Polio causing fearful adults
To forbid running through the hose
Both maladies isolating children
From friends and neighborhood chums.
The Great Depression, quicksand to
Those who owed too much and who
Left in the middle of the night
Or trampled their pride
To wait in “charity lines”.
The Dust Bowl, blackening skies,
Burying crops, hopes, and dreams,
Wind birthing tumbleweeds and despair,
Eastern cities swathed in rolling brown
Clouds that once were western farms.
Not everyone was affected by hardships
Some people even benefitted as time
Kept its steady march toward the future;
The world showed resilience in
Meeting all these crises, but the troubles
Came one at a time.
In 2020 death and despair ganged up on us,
A year unprecedented in the totality
Of its despair exacerbated by isolation,
Families helpless to ease loneliness,
Patients dying with very little comfort.
Written by Edith McDowell Edson
