The Biennial of the Americas presents the Americas COVID-19 Memorial, an artist-driven exhibit acknowledging the grave impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the Americas. While the Americas account for approximately 13% of the world’s population it has experienced nearly 50% of the world’s COVID-19 deaths, with over 2 million lives lost. Featuring artwork from 21 artists across the Western Hemisphere that address this disproportionate impact, this exhibition aims to serve as a space for shared reflection, collective grieving, and healing through art.
Here, Where We Are the Flowers
Original poem by Bobby LeFebre, Colorado Poet Laureate
To watch the live reading click HERE.
One day
the globe is spinning
we are smiling, or not
mundane or magic normalcy walks on two feet
autopilot guides our way—
things are the way know them to be
New lovers braid their fingers together for the first time as the sun sets
The zocalo is full
The Mercado is loud and abundant
The city is a body living and breathing;
we go about our day.
The cumpleañera blows out her birthday candles
We hug our grandmothers with reckless abandon
Every seat at the dinner table is full of friends and family
We are laughing
Mouths flung open
Words unapologetically traveling upon the wind
Vivacity abounds
The next day the globe stops
Together, we furrow our brow
Stumble off kilter
Our hearts become ticking timebombs
Panic begets panic
All of us running in place
The unknown tethers itself to our collective consciousness;
our psyche, a lone wolf howling at the moon
We retreat
Replace wings with worry
Trade the social for the solitary
Make an enemy of touch
Distance becomes our god
Six-feet apart running away from six-feet-under
We forget how to look each other in the eye
Survival becomes a dreary song we play on repeat
Hands chapped from reading one too many headlines
Then slowly, together,
we attempt to construct a new language
knowing words
like our leaders are failing us
We begin to speak in statistics
but here
the numbers are lives;
the percentages are people
Meanwhile, the curve is rising
The crescendo, a destination uncharted
The corporeal try and coax their jettisoned souls back into their bodies
And there are so many bodies
Blood, bones, flesh
Birthmarks, wrinkles, tattoos
Dimples, eyes, hearts
Existence is upended
A hemisphere uprooted
The earth confused by all the graves—
here, where land is acknowledged
but never returned
Grief morphs into trauma
Collective mourning
Curses shouted toward the heavens
Candles lit where life should be
How did we become bygone?
We’ve all lost something
Found ourselves digging for unknown things
in places we have never been
Territory uncharted
Jutting emotions—a compass pointing in directions we have never traversed
Anguish operationalized
But he who has a why to live can bear almost any how
Let us return the circle
This holy hoop of hope that is unending
Let us lick each other’s wounds
Offer one another the medicine of mutual aid
Let our mourning morph into ritual
Let our grief be a tender mercy
Let these tears be libation
Let us become the altar
Something living
Something unfixed
Something capable of transforming
Let us be both the memory and the imagination
The stewards of bridging yesterday to tomorrow
Let us remember so that we never forget
And here,
atop this monument
this memorial embodied
we will learn to harness and activate our anger
Channel and transform our anxiety
Here,
we will exist unafraid to sit in our sadness
To allow for it fester until it transmutes into healing
Let our bruises become a balm
Let our gaping wounds be mouths that translate the pain;
It is ok to not be ok
Let us bathe in the brokenness
Evolve in the emptiness
Faith keeping us forward facing
And in this place we see, but have yet to arrive upon
let us create new meaning
social reconstruction in our hands
Here,
At this human memorial
At this monument in the flesh
Where we are the flowers
Where we are the prayers
Let us say and remember all of their names
Let us shout our own into the void so loudly
that the unborn waiting somewhere in the cosmos
will smile celestially and proud
And we will walk together across time and space
With understanding and empathy
Arms linked together
Experience endured
Healing and heard
And life will bend into tomorrow with promise
Promise
