I.
You slow it down and speak the speech from home
As if admitting no impediments,
No infectious thoughts into your room,
No intrusions, anxious sentiments,
Just cadences of comfort from your couch.
As close as that. Yet you are far enough
To thwart contamination borne of touch,
Random droplets in the air, a cough.
Every day I come to sit with you
To put this ghastly time and place aside,
Inject your native lightness here anew
Into my thoughts of those who may have died,
Or may be dying, or contaminate
Those in the street who can’t self-isolate.
II.
Summoning the bard into your lungs
Might be your day’s initial antidote
Against the plague. Then, climbing up the rungs
To the apex of the ague in the throat
Of your talent, holding his lines there
As if to muster powder for a shot
At wiping out the virus with a prayer
Or spell enacted in a sacred spot,
You step into the spirit of the thing.
You’ve got us where you want, and we’ve got you,
Artful doctor. You begin to sing.
We feel as if we just might make it through.
We step into your seance every day.
You gesture, and the plague has gone away.

*****

David M. Katz writes: “These two poems are part of “These Masks,” a “diary” of 20 Shakespearean sonnets I wrote from March to May 2020, during the very start of the pandemic. When I began, I resolved to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets a day, along with Helen Vendler’s commentary on it in her book, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and then write a sonnet responding to what was happening in the world. Before I wrote the sonnets published here (#s 4 and 5 in the sequence) I found that the great actor Patrick Stewart had begun reading a Shakespeare sonnet a day online from his home. I had previously found Stewart’s 1995 performance in the role of Prospero in The Tempest in New York’s Central Park an inspiration to me poetically and, now, there he was, a bright light during the dark days of the plague, reading to us intimately, every day. The sonnets are in praise of that great joy.”

The ‘Sonnets for Patrick Stewart’ were first published in the Sonnet Scroll of The Poetry Porch.

David M. Katz is the author of five books of poetry—The Biographer, In Praise of Manhattan, Stanzas on Oz, and Claims of Home, all published by Dos Madres Press, and The Warrior in the Forest (House of Keys). Poems of his have appeared in Able Muse, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, and THINK. He is a co-host of the Morningside Poetry Series in Manhattan and posts frequently on his website, The David M. Katz Poetry Blog. He recently starred in Gully’s Paradise, a feature-length film by Shalom Gorewitz.

Photo: ‘Patrick Stewart Performs the Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare’ is an unabridged audio book from Simon & Schuster.