Hush now, 
in America we are counting 
at the feet of monuments to patriots 
along the banks of the Potomac 
on the grassy expanses of cemeteries 
and pedestrian plazas in the year of our Lord
2021 we are counting in the nursing homes 
of New York counting Arkansas and Maine 
and Washington counting from the twilit 
balconies counting from windows overlooking 
city streets overlooking suburban back yards 
in America we are counting as the numbers 
spread like wildfires counting black men and 
women and children gunned down inside 
houses outside schools counting the children 
pledging allegiance before sirens before shots 
before church bells before planted white 
flags waving in The Capitol’s shadow in 
America we remember we are all still 
counting    counting       counting 

Author’s Note:

Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg’s In America: Remember was a public art installation honoring Americans who died from Covid-19. Displayed from September 17 through October 3, 2021, by the time of its close the exhibition blanketed the National Mall near the Washington Monument with 701,133 small white flags—each one representing a life lost during the pandemic—before the death toll rose to more than one million lives lost, and counting.

Margaret Dornaus

holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. A semifinalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 13th annual Narrative Poetry Contest, she had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press Singing Moon in 2020.

Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, won a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America. Recent poems appear in I-70 Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Minyan Magazine, MockingHeart Review, One Art, Silver Birch Press, and The Ekphrastic Review.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ When a Tree Falls, ekphrastic haibun by Margaret Dornaus which MacQ recently nominated for the Red Moon Anthologies.

⚡ Le Rêve, ekphrastic haibun by Margaret Dornaus which was nominated by MacQ in November 2021 for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).