A Different Distance: Two Poets Chronicle Their Isolation Through Verse

In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time—began a correspondence in verse.

Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of toki and toza: this season, this session. Here, from the “plague spring,” through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Naïr’s renga charts the “differents and sames” of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists—even thrives—in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. 

Here's an excerpt from A Different Distance: A Renga

“Since we want to march
from the hospital to the
BDL and set

up our tent, we should wear scrubs
and masks,” Rachid said. Interns,
medical students

were planning one more sit-in.
“We’ll be wearing masks

anyway,” said Nour. “They found
forty new cases last night.”

—MH, 6 July 2020

Another new case,
in our land: Martine Landry,
all of seventy six,

Amnesty activist,
acquitted after three years

of legal nightmares
for her solidarity
to teen refugees

who’d have been wrongly expelled.
Oh, we take pride in being

playwrights of the great
Declaration of Human
Rights—but, it’s a show

we’d rather tour or license
abroad than produce at home.

—KN, 10 July 2020

At home, my brain or
my blood churn out symptoms: stress,
swellings, dizziness,

unhinged by solitude and
anxiety. Telephone

calls replace dinners,
long walks down known, unknown streets.
We’re free, but who’s “we”?

It was a challenge in March.
Is it perpetuity?

—MH, 11 July 2020

“Is it already
the end?” That was from Nurse D,
distractedly, while

finetuning the drip flow to
my chest. Already? Six months,

or twenty-four weeks
and three days; I can spare you
the hours, but let’s throw

in a pandemic for change.
Our laughter rings verdigris.

—KN, 18 July 2020

The grey-green eyes of
the floundered revolutions,
hers and his and hers,

wolves’ eyes in a dream fading
to a blurred image of hills,

apricot orchards,
Beka’a Valley vineyards I
never visited—

Bukra fil-meshmesh, these years’
harvests of gone tomorrows.

— MH, 19 July 2020

Tomorrow has gone,
I learn, for Hasdeo Arand—
forest in central

India, haven for Gond
tribes, eighty-odd species of

trees, scrubs (thirty-eight),
herbs (nineteen), birds (one-one-one) …
sloth bears, elephants,

leopards: larynx of a land.
Coal mines emerge. Through lockdown.

Standing committees
lie down, governments traffic
reserve forests, and

Adani makes hay while a
virus shines—blinding nations.

—KN, 20 July 2020

Extracted with permission from Karthika Nair and Marylin Hacker's A Different Distance: A Renga; published by Westland Books