As more and more of us finally become vaccinated against the virus that’s wrought such damage over the last year, we can start to look back over all that’s happened. And in this week’s poem, “The Tally,” poet Wesley McNair shares such a reckoning. I love this poem’s candor and compassion, the music of its subtle rhymes (both at the end of and within the lines), and the warm, resilient promise of its final words.

A former Maine poet laureate, McNair is the much-acclaimed author of 20 books, including 10 volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” McNair has won grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, two Rockefeller Fellowships, two NEA grants in creative writing and an Emmy Award, and was selected for a United States Artists Fellowship as one of America’s “finest living artists.” “The Tally” will appear in “Where I Woke Up: New & Selected Poems,” forthcoming from Godine in 2022.

The Tally

By Wesley McNair

Those of us who warned
about the growing tally.
Those of us who called it a plot.
Those who attended church in protest
until some of them could not.
Those of us who worked
remotely from their homes,
those of us who couldn’t.
Those who wanted to work,
or couldn’t work at all,
or didn’t have a home.
Some of us who refused
to fund the jobless
so they would get a job.
One of us who blamed
the governors and wouldn’t
fund their states. One of us
who promised cures
that never came, and left
the microphone to someone else
and walked away. Those
who wouldn’t wear a mask
because they loved their freedom,
those who marched for others
who weren’t free. Those who said
they couldn’t breathe
in the hospitals, and said it
in the streets. The many living
at a distance, the many others
who got exposed. The few
who risked their lives for patients
in the ER, up close.
The daily tally that continued.
The families struggling
to cope. The surge
in the white rooms of zero,
and empathy, and hope.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Tally,” copyright © 2021 by Wesley McNair, is forthcoming in “Where I Woke Up: New & Selected Poems” (Godine, 2022). It appears by permission of the author.

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