Social Distance: A Community-Style Poem

In the early weeks of the pandemic last year, “NPR asked listeners to respond to art with a poem — a style of poetry called ekphrastic. For inspiration, Kwame Alexander, NPR’s poet in residence, selected two paintings: Kadir Nelson’s Heatwave and Salvador Dali’s Young Woman At A Window. Both show women inside looking longingly out into the world. The paintings struck a chord with those experiencing the global coronavirus pandemic quarantined inside. We received more than 1,300 submissions. Alexander took lines and excerpts from some of the submissions and created a crowdsourced, community poem of hope.” Check it out here.