COVID MEMORIAL IN WASHINGTON, DC

 

(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

 

Volunteers plant white flags on the National Mall on Wednesday for the "In America: Remember" public art installation by artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg commemorating all Americans who have died from COVID-19. The names of the dead are printed on each flag.

 

(Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

 

The total is now over 670,000. 

 

The undertaking is the largest participatory art installation on the Mall since the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1987. And as Sandburg alludes to in the final lines, what will we collectively learn from this enormous loss and will we apply it to the next outbreak event? Or will much be forgotten, ignored, willfully secreted? There'll just be the grass.

 

Grass

Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?

                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.

                                          Let me work.