THE BLAME GAME

by Joel Savishinsky

It is hard to predict where

     the next contagion will erupt,

          or how, or when.

 

Most of us do not even understand

     what is already understood

          about the plagues of the past.

 

Few recall, or ever know, for instance,

     that the “Spanish flu” of 1918 began

          at an American army base in Kansas.

 

But surely, at the next

     outbreak of outrage,

          the cause for the spread of whatever

 

may well be laid at the feet of a Chinese lab,

      an Asian market, or an African village…

          anywhere but here…

 

unless, of course,

     our leaders can blame

          someone like Dr. Fauci.

Joel Savishinsky, an anthropologist and gerontologist, is the author most recently of Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging (The Poetry Box, 2023). His earlier work, The Ends of Time: Life and Work in A Nursing Home, and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both won the Gerontological Society of America’s annual book prize. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his other writings have appeared in Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Passager, and The New York Times. He lives in Seattle, trying to raise hell and five grandchildren.

FIERCE FRAGILE SEASONS

a poem in four parts
by Jill Crainshaw

I

mama cardinal studies me as i stand
in rain-wet morning sunlight

i see fire flash in her feathers
when she flits and flashes

from fencepost to flaming forsythia
nesting in preparation for whatever

springtime color waits to touch the earth

II

sepia-soaked scrapbooks ensconce
human fragilities exposed

i study faces retreating from
fiery colors of aliveness buried

in catacombs where mortal coils
were torn away too soon from butterflies

waiting even now to meet the sunrise

III

night settles down into streets emptied
of laughing children and lingering lovers

spinning cocoons to hide fragile dreams
while the world shuts out a sinister stalker

a brave pinion pushes open a window
slips a lonely song into the silence and hope

throbs in voices that swell together on the breeze

IV

backyard cardinals carry
springtime rhythms in their beaks

wrens domicile in the abandoned eaves
of the church belfry next door

and we humans study yet again how to
weave into our nests fiery threads of hope

longing to color unsettled nights with song


Jill Crainshaw is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a liturgical theology professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

PANDEMIC

by Tricia Knoll

US updates travel warning to China to highest level as mayor of Wuhan admits authorities were too slow in releasing information about virus. Photo: medical teams in Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, treat a patient as Beijing records its first death. (Chine Nouvelle/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock) —The Guardian, January 28, 2020

Fifty years ago I wrote science fiction,
one manuscript about a pandemic killing
nearly everyone except the elusive
sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest
and tribes of women wearing cedar
robes who lived in far-flung outposts.

I heard those 1918 stories. The missing
grandfather of an old man, the circus
performer. Ancestral trees where leaves
fell on apathetic soil. Decimations.
Like the scourges of genocide
that took the people who first
lived on this continent. Then
scientists dug up the old dead
to study the virus.

These viruses creep, cavalier
and potent through airports,
luxury liners, transports.
I wonder if anti-vaxxers
believe in masks? Or prefer
roulette?

I no longer believe the sasquatch
have survived the fires. I no longer
have faith in women in robes
in remote camps who study the past.
Nowhere is remote any more.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet. Vermont is remote and is the second most-unpopulated state in the US. She carries a flame for social justice.