Resurrecting the plague. Notes after camu.
What's natural is the microbe, all the rest, health,
integrity, purity. All the rest is just human will.
A vigilance that must never falter.
The good person, the person who never infects, is the one with the fewest lapses of attention.
Pestilence has a way of recurring in the world.
Yet somehow still we find it hard to believe,
crashing down from the clearest blue,
history made in devastating surprise, and historic rhetoric
rhetorically repeated having nothing to hear but fear itself.
At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends there's always a propensity for rhetoric. We tell ourselves
Pestilence is a bad dream. It will pass away a miracle, but it doesn't.
It's men who pass away, and
women and children,
mostly those written in the margins.
Individual destinies become collective destiny
The microbe is of a singular mind
imbued with a singular mission
Fatten the curve before it flattens, feeding full until the epidemic reaching its objective limit
achieving its sated purpose calls a
postprandial retreat.
Pestilence has a way of recurring in the world.
Still the habit of despair
seems worse than despair itself and
tiring the truth is
exhausting
Nothing is less sensational than pestilence. If only by reason of its varied duration
The truth has a way of recurring in the world.
Great misfortunes become monotonous a
vote for resurrection
roll the stone from the door
but not without weight and
reservation
All we can win in conflict with the plague
is knowledge and
memories and
life.
Choose life.
What's natural is the microbe, pestilence as a way of recurring in the world
Yet hope seems equally persistent sowing
newly germinated seeds
so stumbling forward we go lurching upward we must
groping through
disinfected darkness to ascending visions of love and light
further apart
Yet closer together
Trying to resurrect what small good
That for better or for worse?
Lay in our small and too idle power.
Easter 2020
