When everything starts to break, people usually turn to the loud ones. The experts. The politicians. The optimists with charts and slogans. But when the noise dies down and the shock settles in, that’s when poets step forward. Quietly. Patiently. Pen in hand. Because someone has to look, really look at what just happened. That’s the art of witnessing. And it’s why poets matter most when the world is on fire.
Not to Fix, but to See:
A poet doesn’t arrive with answers. They arrive with attention. Where others rush to explain or justify, the poet just observes the trembling of a hand, the hollow echo in an empty street or the way a mask hides more than a face.
In Todling into Oblivion, David L. Wade doesn’t treat the pandemic, or climate change, or loneliness as concepts. He treats them as lived experiences. Masks aren’t about statistics, they’re about human distance disguised as safety. Death Dream & COVID-19 (2020) doesn’t try to soothe, it just tells the truth that death was everywhere and yet we kept dreaming. This is witnessing at its purest. The act of saying I saw this. It happened. We were here.
Poets as Historians of Feeling:
History will always record the numbers of the infection rates, the policies and the loss. But what it won’t capture is the smell of disinfectant on your hands, the silence of sirens after midnight and the way your heart leapt at the sound of a friend’s voice after weeks of isolation. That’s what poets archive. Not the data, but the pulse.
When Wade writes The Pandemic’s Still Here or Fresh Air 2077, he’s not cataloguing events. He’s recording atmosphere of the way fear and hope coexist, how laughter still sneaks through the cracks. Future generations won’t just know what happened, they’ll feel it. And that difference is everything. Because the facts fade but the feelings stay.
The Courage to Look Without Turning Away:
Witnessing takes courage. It’s easier to scroll past disaster than to hold its gaze. Poets don’t have that luxury. Their job is to walk straight into the discomfort and translate it into language the rest of us can live with.
Wade’s Street Girl does that with brutal honesty. It doesn’t sanitize pain or moralize it, it simply holds space for someone society forgot. And that act alone, the willingness to see, becomes an act of moral resistance. When the world hides its wounds behind hashtags and headlines, the poet’s role is to peel back the covering and say, “This is real. Don’t look away.”
Poetry as Empathy Made Visible:
In a crisis, empathy can feel like a luxury. Something nice to have once survival is guaranteed. But poetry reminds us it’s not optional. It’s oxygen.
Reading a poem that captures your own fear or grief doesn’t fix it, but it tells you that you’re not alone. That someone, somewhere, felt what you felt and had the bravery to write it down. Wade’s language is sometimes sharp and sometimes surreal, but it turns empathy into texture. You can touch it. He doesn’t preach hope, he earns it, line by line.
Why We Still Need Poets:
When systems fail, art remains. When people forget, words remember. We need poets in a crisis because they keep the human story alive when everything else becomes mechanical. They teach us how to listen when shouting doesn’t help. They make us notice the small mercies, the light through hospital blinds and the way rain keeps falling even in lockdown.
A poet doesn’t rebuild the world. They remind us why it’s worth rebuilding. It’s about choosing to stay awake when it would be easier to sleep through history. That’s what David L. Wade does in Todling into Oblivion. He watches. He listens. He writes it down. And through his words, we remember that being human, even in crisis, is still a kind of art.