Many of the poets in the summer issue, dedicated to heroes, provide acutely observed accounts of those desperately trying to save lives among the hundreds of thousands of patients who have COVID-19. Besides their descriptions of the physical and emotional suffering of patients, they provide sympathetically imagined first-person accounts of the fears and exhaustion of healthcare professionals facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis that is testing their mettle as never before. Reading the poems of Dina Greenberg, Rebecca Ramsden, Pamela Cranston, and Ermelinda Makkimane will deepen your appreciation for what it’s like to act heroically while simply selflessly doing your job in the face of overwhelming conditions. Greenberg captures the internal struggle with such powerful empathy: “Make an inventory of all parts / before you begin assembly / enumerate the dead & / the afflicted / rinse and repeat / break your heart wide open / don’t think the unthinkable / don’t think, don’t think.”

Ramsden also pays tribute to the less-noticed essential workers: “these working hands pack / and parcel, bath and bundle, / face violence, fight fires, / lug and lift.” Cranston and Jill Jennings give us history’s heroes: Florence Nightingale and the cell donor Henrietta Lacks. Stephanie Valente pays tribute to the strength each of us needs to muster to survive this new reality visited upon us.

Reading all these poems and those in the COVID-19 section, one comes away with the impression that our poets, as a group, have also taken on the role of Old Testament prophets who called out the sins of the wicked to warn of future retribution if change was resisted. Directly and indirectly, these poems bring to mind the failures by governments to be prepared for the pandemic, or in the U.S., the denial of its reality for political gain. Michael Giorgio’s poem “Darnella” draws attention to the convergence of the failure to address ongoing healthcare issues that most critically harm African Americans here, with the chronic problem of Black males being killed by law enforcement in disproportionate numbers—injustices too many are either oblivious to or, in the case of the breakdown of law enforcement, long accepted by too many of us, as merely isolated examples. During the civil rights movement, Malcolm X gave an incendiary speech that came to be known as “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which he took the rhetorical stance that if violence against Black Americans did not stop and their rights continued to be denied, they would have no choice but to take up arms to defend themselves. A responsible citizen today, reading all the poems of our July issue, might well hear a chorus of voices chanting “the ballot, the ballot, the ballot.” Not that our work would be done, but in this time of crisis removing the incompetent and self-serving from office must be an important step. To maintain the status quo is no choice at all—and a disservice to all the lives that have been and will continue to be lost to the virus, or to ignorance and complacency.

Steve Granzyk is the poetry editor of Please See Me.