I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
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John Freeman is the editor of the literary annual Freeman’s. His most recent books are The Park, a collection of poems, and Tales of Two Planets, an anthology about the climate crisis and inequality. He lives in New York City.
When both of us were fourteen days clear of getting over COVID, I left our New York apartment for the first time in a long while and quickly became alarmed. No one was on the street. This was in April, when tourists normally descend on Manhattan in flocks, even in our off-avenue neighborhood. But this year a tumbleweed would not have been out of place.