Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: April 19, 2026

If it’s April, it’s “Poetry Month,” and I can hear the sighs and tacit “So whats?” already.

So what? Well, I’ll tell you. Three years ago this month, I interviewed a friend of mine for this column, a former Island resident, Michael Rosenwasser who, at the time, had written a poem a day since the start of the COVID pandemic three years before.

I headlined that column “Poetry From the Trenches,” because that’s where it was coming from: our separate bunkers, where we were all dug-in for the duration, a huge country that was suddenly entrenched in a national quarantine.

One of the reasons Mike gave for having written, by that time, well over 1,000 poems that he’d posted on Facebook, was this: “I could take all the baggage that was in my head and stick it out there at six o’clock every morning … it was very therapeutic in a lot of ways.” 

The thing is, although that frequently lethal viral infection has abated, Mike is still at it, because, it turns out, a wider, systemic infection is still threatening our country and our world. I thought, therefore, that it might be timely, now three years later, in this present “Poetry Month,” to check in with a man who continues to help keep himself alive mentally and emotionally, one day at a time, by writing poetry.

In answer to my question to him the other day: “Why still?” Mike sent me a couple of his poems.  Here’s an excerpt from one:

Day 2182

… This all began/exactly six years ago./March 19th, 2020. The virus engulfed us./

Here we are./Those who survived.

To fight on./Fighting on/Still engulfed.

By: Not some invisible, insidious/invader./That a vaccine might/and thankfully did,/mostly,/disable.

Now the insidiousness comes/from within./No vaccine can disable it.

And the warring now is/literally in the gulf./Oh, for the good old horrible days/ of the pandemic.

Mike is actually an exponent of a movement, the modern iteration of which started back in the early 1800’s, and which arose from the filthy, gritty “trenches” of the Industrial Revolution. One of my favorite examples Is by William Wordsworth:

The World is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

This lament has a theme all too familiar to us today — our world’s tragic estrangement from Nature, including from our fellow humans.

It reflects a movement discussed by author Marc Barham in his article on medium.com: “Wordsworth is considered one of the founding fathers of English Romanticism who initiated the Romantic movement in English literature. Alongside … Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published ‘Lyrical Ballads’ in 1798. In the preface Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ … and he calls his own poems in the book ‘experimental’ … [he wanted poetry to be ] … unconstrained by the poetic diction of 18th century verse but would strive to encompass the language ’really used by men’ … and away from the tropes of highly stylized creations, to the clear, understandable, immediacy of the English vernacular. Revolutionary, some would argue.”

And so, the tradition of using language “really used by men” to tell powerful, often brutal, truths about real life continues, in a form that’s kind of a shorthand for the soul, but derives not only from the trenches alone:

Day 2209

Listen all ye sinners for the mating call

of the Chuck Wills whippoorwill,

high in the trees, hiding, always calling,

while the moon rises in the clear night sky,

the wind comes whooshing off the ocean,

the deer scurry in the dunes,

the blue crowned night heron rests stoic,

on the broken branch in the pond close

to the rookery where the elegant egrets

claim their self-anointed perch

for the night.

And we watch, still, silent,

taking the simple majesty of it all in,

from our self-appointed,

prudent perch

close by.

Thanks, Michael.