Chris Reed is a writer who has found meaning, solace, and connection from the reading and writing of poetry during this pandemic. She finds that the need to speak to the racial violence and growing economic inequities and loss of lives experienced in 2020, is complicated by her own relative safety as she shelters in place with her ninety-nine-year-old mother. A retired Unitarian Universalist minister, with a mixed family, she wrestles with how to express empathy for so much hurt, at the same time owning one’s white privilege, and yet acknowledging that personal pain can be found anywhere.