This week the world passed the 6 million mark for recorded deaths from Covid. It is a staggering number, one that is difficult to wrap our heads around. Yet each loss is personal and has profound significance for those who knew and loved that person.
One of those we lost in 2020 (though not to Covid) was poet Marvin Bell. Bell was the first poet laureate of Iowa and taught for years in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In one of his most well-known poems, Bell speaks to the particularity of loss. In the poem, he claims a child said, “Things that are lost are all equal.” On the face of it, this seems true (especially when we’re considering losses in the millions) but isn’t, says the poet. He then goes on to imagine what particularly would be lost if his beloved, Dorothy, were lost to him.
Because he was a gifted poet, Marvin Bell—and his Dorothy—will be remembered well into the future by anyone who reads his work. I wish this were true for so many more of the 6 million plus we’ve lost since 2020. For now, I am taking this beautiful poem as a reminder to notice the unique and particular about those I love so that I can carry them in my heart, even if one of us is lost.
To Dorothy
You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.—Marvin Bell
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director