When 30-year-old journalist and South Delhi resident Sonali Prasad came down with the virus in April this year, verses from Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese, that her father would read from outside her room, came to her rescue. Later, when he, too, contracted Covid-19, his recorded recital on Prasad’s phone helped her brave 15 odd days of distressful isolation. “With fever and nausea, I was a shell of a person. I couldn’t do much, but miraculously, I could write poetry. It would come out in torrents, and became the only way to process my emotions and anxiety,” recalls Prasad. After she had recovered, Prasad began wondering if, like her, poetry could soothe others too. As a writer with a keen interest in historical records, Prasad embarked on creating a cache of poetry — in the form of the crowd-sourced project Solarium - to mark this hour of crisis.

Sonali Prasad