You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Not long ago, the Orange County Museum of Art commissioned the Los Angeles artist Alan

Nakagawa to do a project about social distancing.

So he invited people to write and record their own hicoos about their experiences

during lockdown. The result was an online audio collage that he called

social distancing Haiku and you, and it's online at his website Ellen Nakagawaagawa. And Grant, these are really good, you know, the 575 syllable format of Haiku really lends itself to this moment somehow. I wanted to share some of these with you.

Yes please. Some of them are just beautiful like this one from Mark Romanic.

No traffic, no plains, distant laughter drifts over the canyon. Only

bird song now. That's really evocative, right?

Yeah, and that's what it was.

I live next to freeways, and it was astonishing how little traffic there was at the start of the lockdown and quarantine.

It was eerie.

Here's another one. Sunshine warms the ground.

Trees dance outside my window. I dance by myself.

Oh, that's a little sad. I know, I know, it's sort of beautiful and poignant all at the same time. That's by Anne Tracy.

And then this one, I'm sure lots of people appreciate, this one's by Leslie Rose, the space between us in the grocery

isles every face masked you know it reminds me of petals on a wet black bow. Yeah, yeah, because the socialness of shopping where you're talking about produce or run into

somebody that you know is hindered or muted by the

by the masks in the distance.

Yeah, some of these really pack a punch.

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