Many thanks to the West Florida Literary Federation for including 2 of my coronavirus-inspired pieces of writing—poem “The Earth Lives On” and nonfiction narrative essay “COVID-19 Sidewalk Chalk 4-16-2020″—in their collection published yesterday, Life in the Time of Corona, which is a special edition of their newsletter, The Legend. Please visit the site and collection and read all the wonderful pieces there. Mine are on pages 6 and 7.

As I said, “Sidewalk Chalk” is a flash nonfiction, creative nonfiction narrative essay, and “The Earth Lives On” is a poem of 7 stanzas of 4 lines each. The first line of each stanza is 9 syllables. The last line of each stanza is 7 syllables and indented. The middle 2 lines are all 8 syllables, except for the third line of the first stanza, which is 9 syllables like the first line to add emphasis to that line, to make it more important than any of the other stanza’s middle lines, and to give it specific parallelism with the poem’s very first line. “The Earth Lives On” also references the major world events in my lifetime that have most affected me, as well as history.

My writer’s journey continues.