Artist’s Statement:
I’ve been collaborating with poet Cindy Hunter Morgan for several years on a film/poetry hybrid festival we call FILMETRY. After one year in person we were shunted to the virtual world for our 2020 and 2021 festivals. In 2021, the poetry selections came from the anthology Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic, published by Lily Poetry Review.
This poem of Cindy’s starts with the story (myth?) of Johnny Cash being the first American to know of Stalin’s death, and jumps off to reflect on our collective act of straining through the noise for some kind of signal in the early days of the pandemic. If there was any kind of data, or signal, or intelligence that nature or the universe was trying to push through to us, even 2 and 3 years into the pandemic I’m not sure we’re sufficiently trained to hear it.
