And the People Stayed Home

Kitty O’Meara

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Listening

As O’Meara enumerates various pandemic-triggered changes in people’s lives in the second and third stanzas, the only action she mentions is listening. In the first instance, the people simply “listened” (Line 2), as they also engaged in other activities, but then “they listened more deeply” (Line 4). Therefore, listening is a symbol of a particular and uncommon state of mind: putting aside the ordinary preoccupations that inhabit everyday thoughts and becoming more attuned to what is both around and inside. The sentence about listening “more deeply” (Line 4) follows the idea that people “were still” (Line 3), and precedes the reference to people who “mediated, […], prayed, [and] danced” (Line 4). All these activities are related to listening. When people suspend their hectic daily routine and are “still” (Line 3), they can pay more attention to other people: How are they doing? What do they need? How can everyone be there for each other? One can also be more perceptive of immediate surroundings—whether that be sights and sounds of nature or of the city. Meditation, prayer, and dancing all require concentration, which makes them forms of deep listening, whether listening to music, to the sensations of one’s own body, or to personal spiritual needs. Whether external or internal, listening “more deeply” (Line 4) is an essential part of the personal and communal transformation the poem imagines.

Meeting Your Shadow

The sentence that follows the references to listening deeply (including through meditation, prayer, and dance) is the most obscure statement in the poem: “Some met their / shadows” (Lines 4-5). As she acknowledges in an interview, O’Meara borrows the image from the work of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Jung uses the phrase “shadow self” as an umbrella term for the repressed aspects of a person’s identity—parts of the human being that one refuses to acknowledge or might be unable to see. Meeting one’s shadow, then, implies facing the aspects of self that are more easily ignored. O’Meara implies that the pandemic forces people to do that. In her own words: “[W]e sit, and sit still, and meet our shadows. Meet those things that take us to deeper places within ourselves and for all of us. That’s the point of transformation in life” (Riechers, Mark. "A Viral Poem for a Virus Time." 2020. To the Best of Our Knowledge).

In the broader context of the poem, meeting humanity’s collective shadow implies facing the actions through which people harm each other and the planet. The poem points out that people sometimes behave in ways that are “ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless” (Line 7). If humanity wants to heal itself and the planet, there must be an acknowledgment of such behavior so there can be real change. (For a blog entry in which O’Meara discusses the idea of meeting one’s shadow in more detail, see Further Resources.)

The Earth

When O’Meara writes about the need to heal the earth, she certainly means the planet Earth, but that noun has more specific and varied connotations. The most obvious implication is the current environmental crisis. Climate change caused by human activity has reached a level that most scientists consider very dangerous. Glaciers are melting and oceans rising; extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity; dozens of animal species daily become extinct, and viruses spread across the globe with unprecedented speed. These and other phenomena are disrupting various ecosystems and causing an ecological imbalance that profoundly impacts the planet.

However, the earth’s malaise is not merely environmental and climatological; it is also economic and social. Unequal access to resources—including those who can mitigate the climate crisis or stop the spread of a pandemic—makes the situation worse. Desperate people escaping violence and starvation will continue resorting to uncontrolled migration, especially as their native lands become less habitable. Harmful viruses will keep spreading and mutating if rich countries fail to help vaccination efforts in the countries of need. Life on earth will include unconscionable human suffering as long as financial profit drives behavior, rather than a desire for solidarity and altruism. O’Meara’s poem is condensed in its rhetoric but quite sweeping in its implications. The earth here symbolizes all aspects of human existence that need healing, and the desired “new ways of being” (Line 3) are not only personal and individual but communal and even global.