by David Southward
Mother Nature has a way
of teaching all who underplay
her lethal power, not to do it.
How? She simply puts them through it.
Thus, when her emissaries sent us
germs to baffle an apprentice,
he who most pooh-poohed the virus
(heaping scorn on scorn to tire us)
soon bowed down to violent grace
and in a mirror saw the face
of vanity—its purse and pout
contorted by a creeping doubt.
David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Apocrypha (Wipf & Stock 2018) and Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020), and winner of the 2019 Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry.