by David Radavich
You brought us the gift
of potential death.
Not wearing a mask,
not distancing,
not deigning
to get a vaccine.
And now the whole
family is sick—
generations—
and the threat
has taken up residence
in our very house.
Thank you
for reminding us
the end is not far off—
maybe soon—
disease is
a form of politics,
and we are all one
in our shared suffering.
If we didn’t believe
in community, we do now.
Let us hope healing
comes fast and the goat
scapes into the woods.
David Radavich's latest narrative collection is America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019), companion volume to his earlier America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007). Recent lyric collections are Middle-East Mezze (2011) and The Countries We Live In (2014). His forthcoming book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German Poems from Deutscher Lyrik Verlag.