And the People Stayed Home

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.

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.