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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.
