Lymphoma Meditation-1 ©2019 Michael Dickel

“…the ailing body points to culture, pain points to philosophy, language points to consciousness, and all point to what is still to be learned about our fragility, our mortality, and how to live a meaningful life.” Ann Jurecic, Illness as Narrative (Composition, Literacy, and Culture), p. 131

Unnameable

Large B-cell lymphoma with T cell-rich…
Damn, how do I slip that mouthful in.
To my life. My thought. This poem?

The tumor breached my spine, pressed
its attack onto nerves. A tactic to cut
communication channels. Painful alarum.

Yet here we arrive. The first day of Spring—
Shushan Purim. We walk in Jerusalem’s
Botanical Garden. The first chemical attack

on the tumor, the lymphoma, my body—
this day—dispensation given to fight back
against this pogrom in my very bones.

The red anemones, pink cyclamen,
something purple I cannot name,
shine with indifference to the wars

within my body and surrounding us.

Here we met a friend, just declared
cancer-free. Here we quietly held hands.

Here I felt something I cannot name.

—Michael Dickel

Winston Churchill in Uniform

“The boy, who as a man would later go on to lead the nation in WWII, was obviously affected by the pandemic known then as the Russian Flu in 1890.” B. H. Fraser, Poetry and the Flu, City Poems

COVID-19, the novel coronavirus (another mouthful) occupying our media and minds, spreads toward pandemic. Our responses, as societies and cultures across the globe, likely reveal much about us, as humans. If “the ailing body points to culture,” as Jurecic writes, what do thousands—or millions—of ailing bodies point toward?

Winston Churchill, as a teenager, wrote about the late 19th Century Russian Flu:

The Influenza, 1890

Oh how shall I its deeds recount
Or measure the untold amount
Of ills that it has done?
From China’s bright celestial land
E’en to Arabia’s thirsty sand
It journeyed with the sun.…

And now Europa groans aloud,
And ‘neath the heavy thunder-cloud
Hushed is both song and dance;
The germs of illness wend their way
To westward each succeeding day…

—Winston Churchill (age 15) Excerpts: Stanzas 1 and 7 of 12, emphasis added. Full poem

The poem ends with with very imperialistic overtones extolling Britain, especially in the last stanza:

God shield our Empire from the might
Of war or famine, plague or blight
And all the power of Hell,
And keep it ever in the hands
Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands,
Who fought and conquered well.

This could indeed voice the culture of late 19th C. Great Britain, couldn’t it?

Patients from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 killed more than three times as many people as the World War that preceded it (US National Archives). Yet not much was written about it. Here are extracts from two poems reprinted in a medical journal special issue on influenza, one from 1918, in the midst of the pandemic, and one from a century later:

The Influenza

Influenza, labeled Spanish,
came and beat me to my knees;
even doctors couldn’t banish
from my form that punk disease;
for it’s not among the quitters;
vainly doctors pour their bitters
into ailing human critters;
they just sneeze and swear and sneeze.

Said my doctor, “I have tackled
every sort of ill there is
(I have cured up people shackled
by the gout and rheumatiz);
with the itch and mumps I’ve battled,
in my triumphs have been tattled,
but this ‘flu’ stuff has me rattled,
so I pause to say G. Whiz.”

I am burning, I am freezing,
in my little truckle bed;
I am cussing, I am sneezing,
with a poultice on my head;
and the doctors and the nurses
say the patient growing worse is,
and they hint’ around of hearses,
and of folks who should be dead.…

—Walt May (1918)

The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

…It affected the lungs and caused their skin to turn blue
Comfort was given it was all they could do
In effect it caused people to suffocate
And it continued to spread at an alarming rate.

People kept away from large crowds and were told to wear masks
And they struggled to perform their daily tasks
Remote areas in the world were affected too
By this airborne killer virus, the great Spanish flu.

Efforts were made to slow down this disease
But slowly and surely was bringing the world to its knees
Shops opening times were staggered all over the lands
And people were encouraged not to shake hands.…

They closed many schools, services were hit too
With workers struck down by this merciless flu…

—Tom Cunningham (2018)

Both poems from: “Tres Poemas Sobre la Pandemia de Gripe de 1918.” Virología: Publicación Oficial de la Sociedad Española de Virología, 21:1 pp.68–72 (PDF of the journal, with full versions of these poems and another) Note: Walt May, a humorist / poet, wrote for newspapers, with his poems formatted as prose in newspaper columns. I have taken the liberty to adjust the line breaks from the source article.

Do these examples point to differences in culture over that century? What would our own poems point to, written now, at the beginning of a potential pandemic?

Jurecic points out that “despite the [1918–1919] flu’s ferocity, for much of the twentieth century this pandemic nearly vanished from popular consciousness.…the pandemic is virtually absent from American and British literature of its era” (p.1). After citing a few literary examples that do exist from the 1918 influenza pandemic in narrative prose literature (so not the 1918 poem above), Jurecic asks this: “How to bring the pandemic and the narrative form together? It is as if the project were unimaginable in the early twentieth century” (p. 1). Is it imaginable in ours?

“In stark contrast”, she points out, much has been written about HIV / AIDS (once we acknowledged it): “Journalists, playwrights, novelists, poets, memoirists, and diarists joined artists from other media in an effort to document the [AIDS] pandemic, create memorial art, and make meaning of suffering and loss on scales ranging from individual to global” (Jurecic 1–2). She gives many reasons for this, but this is a writing prompt, so…

WEDNESDAY WRITING PROMPT

* Editor’s Note: Twelve hours after this post went up, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus crisis a pandemic.  Link HERE. for details. 

This prompt emerges from musing about Jurecic’s questions and the quote at the top of the page: How to bring illness (personal or pandemic) of the ailing body, pain, and language to point to culture, philosophy, and consciousness in poetry that also points “…to what is still to be learned about our fragility, our mortality, and how to live a meaningful life”? Especially at this cultural-historical moment of an emerging pandemic?

Start your writing, from the midst of this emerging COVID-19 pandemic.

Write what is unnameable.

Good health to you.

—Michael Dickel
Lecturer, David Yellin
Contributing Editor of The BeZine

 Share your poem/s and …

  • please submit your poem/s by pasting them into the comments section and not by sharing a link
  • please submit poems only, no photos, illustrations, essays, stories, or other prose

PLEASE NOTE:

Poems submitted through email or Facebook will not be published.

Deadline:  Monday, March by 16 pm Pacific Time. If you are unsure when that would be in your time zone, check The Time Zone Converter.

Anyone may take part Wednesday Writing Prompt, no matter the status of your career: novice, emerging or pro.  It’s about exercising the poetic muscle, showcasing your work, and getting to know other poets who might be new to you.

You are welcome – encouraged – to share your poems in a language other than English but please accompany it with a translation into English.

Source: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Postscript

“By the flash-light of her fevered vision, Plath leads us into an apocalyptic wasteland. Then, like a hypnotist, she brings us back from it…She [becomes] the master of her feverish animal, all-powerful and entirely autonomous, self-made, and self-regenerating…”

—Kary Wayson, The incinerating vision of this Plath classic. Poem Guide, The Poetry Foundation

An extract from the Sylvia Plath poem Wayson analyzes, to serve as further inspiration:

Fever 103°

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak…

—Sylvia Plath ©1993 Ted Hughes used under fair-use provisions
Full poem for fuller inspiration.

Further readings…

  • Dickinson, Emily. “Pain—has an Element of Blank.” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little Brown, 1960. 323–24.
  • Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
  • Jurecic, Ann. Illness as Narrative (Composition, Literacy, and Culture). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Pr, 2012.
    Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
  • McKim, A. Elizabeth. “Making Poetry of Pain: The Headache Poems of Jane Cave Winscom.” Literature and Medicine. 24.1 (2005): 93–108.
  • Oates, Joyce Carol. “Confronting Head-On the Face of the Afflicted.” New York Times. 19 Feb. 1995. 3 Nov. 2008
  • Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1978, 1988.
  • Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
  • U.S. National Archives. “The Deadly Virus: The Influenza of 1918–1919.” Web Page.

MICHAEL DICKEL (Meta /Phor (e) /Play) has won international awards and been translated into several languages. His latest poetry collection, Nothing Remembers (Finishing Line Press, 2019). A poetry chapbook, Breakfast at the End of Capitalism, came out in 2017 (free PDF ). His flash fiction collection, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden, came out in 2016. Previous books include: War Surrounds Us, Midwest / Mid-East, and The World Behind It, Chaos…(archived free PDF ). He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36, was managing editor for arc-23 and 24, and is a past-chair of the Israel Association of Writers in English. He publishes and edits Meta/ Phor(e) /Play and is a contributing editor of The BeZine. He grew up in the US Midwest and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel.

Jamie Dedes:

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20 Comments

  1. Pandemic

    I have a small cold
    and a library book to return.
    Should I wipe it clean with disinfectant
    and return it through the book drop?
    Or let it become overdue?

    I have a hair appointment
    for next week Thursday.
    If I feel better by then,
    should I keep it?

    I have a massage appointment
    for the following week
    which I really need
    because I’m stressed
    but they tell me not to come
    for two weeks from the onset
    of an illness. Do I count from
    Monday when I began feeling
    run-down or Friday
    when I finally I knew why?
    One means keep it,
    the other cancel.

    I don’t know if I have a fever.
    My thermometer’s broken
    and there are none in the stores,
    but I’m in the target age group who die.

    I have health insurance. Should I get tested?
    The news says not to just show up
    at your doctor’s office,
    if you think you have the virus.
    But will they then show at mine
    making a spectacle, lights a-flaring,
    outing me to the neighbors?
    Or will it be like China
    removing me by force?

    My job tells us to stay home if sick
    but they don’t provision for those
    who don’t have enough sick leave
    so I don’t call the doctor and go to work,
    pretending to be perfectly well.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  2. Viva Italia

    because we all
    get influenced by all
    and all is you
    and the air is heavy on the shoulders
    let’s sit down all
    (the night is a round table)
    accept each other and
    give ourselves to all
    then the song remains
    eternal
    (because is chanted)

    after your voice comes mine
    around fire

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  3. The Virus

    On my till
    An old lady flinches when I touch
    Her handing her change.

    Boss is stockpiling anti-bac wipes.
    Wash your hands as often as you can
    As money is the dirtiest of things.

    Anti-bac wipe your touch screen,
    And where folk lift up the fridge doors,
    And the price strips.

    Toilet rolls are disappearing.
    It dissipates the virus,
    While it rests on other surfaces.

    Folk avoid public bannisters,
    Walk down the middle.
    That old woman’s flinch
    Stays in my mind.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  4. (Stephen King fans are probably likely to enjoy this piece a bit more than other readers. The number 19 is important to him, and figures deeply in many of his works, but none more so than in his Magnum Opus, “The Dark Tower” series.)

    ~ SK was Right ~

    They call it COVID, magic number 19,
    One letter off, from birds who pick the bones clean.
    Who are the carrion crows of this battle?
    Who rake in profits from each, extended death-rattle?

    The child king fired all the medic Gunslingers.
    Now that he needs help, he only points fingers.
    Has “Captain Trips” finally come at long last?
    Does the Man in Black wear a plague doctor’s beaked mask?

    “KA is a wheel…its one purpose, is to turn.”
    Maybe Gaia just got tired of watching the world burn?
    Each life snuffed out: a brick in the Dark Tower,
    Each one, marking Mankind’s plummet from power?

    All the child king’s puppets, and all his “Yes-Men”
    Can’t put the world back together again.
    If only we had some sort of Pandemic Team!
    Or money for tests, instead of golf on the green.
    Hindsight in 2020? Remains to be seen.

    They call it COVID, magic number 19,

    Perhaps it’s KA…and “All things serve the Beam.”

    ~ C.L.R. © 2020

    Liked by 4 people

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  5. C-VIRUS
    by Clarissa Simmens

    Moving toward the Megallion Swamp
    My mystical swamp with a
    Host of ghost characters
    Summer sweats pheromones for
    Mosquito troops hunting sweet blood
    Females, say the science sites
    Pregnant females feed on humans
    I swat and stomp in ankle combat boots
    Water moccasins visible
    In the evaporating water
    But me, I have a mission

    Peopled swamp calling me
    Some dressed in white
    Hoodoo circle chanting
    Others in white Baptismal light
    Some in Grays or Blues
    Maybe reenactment troops
    Some in cheap suits like old
    Blues bands shredding their guitars
    Ghostly voices drifting over a
    Tract of swamp advertised for sale
    Of More-Or-Less 4.5 acres
    Me, my mission moving toward summer
    In the Sunshine State

    Candidates spewing hate
    Quarantined countries
    Smiles and frowns hid behind
    Medical masks while hoarding
    Cases of hand sanitizers
    The swamp shadows I see
    Doctors with beaks
    Bubonic Plague masks
    “Bring out your dead!”
    Time an illusion as
    Einstein said
    Because surely we’ve
    Stepped off the Tardis of Time
    Without Dr. Who to rescue me and you
    Into a swamp of history
    Repeating itself and all the
    Technology
    Uselessly
    Impotent in the swarm of germs

    What mission can a high-risk
    So-called “elderly” woman claim?
    What can I do except
    Crash through the watery milieu of
    Chaos
    Carrying a bag of herbs
    Extracted in Winn Dixie vodka
    Waiting for the full moon to offer
    The untried elixir to swamp denizens
    And others
    Gathered beyond my back yard
    Of a once-sane haven
    Beneath Orion’s protection.

    And I hear voices
    Voices in the swamp
    I see miasmic misery
    Smell the smoke of
    Charred dreams
    And must see if it is
    A vision of expectations
    Or the real thing

    Healing Reiki bear
    Comes bearing herbal gifts
    From the Forest of pure rain
    Cordoncillo
    Jaborandi
    Lapacho
    Mighty words that
    Might as well
    Mean Abracadabra
    Yet even that has worked for some
    In the past

    I so want to save us all…

    Liked by 6 people

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  6. Hi, linked to this post, in a longer Covid-19 post I made. Containing this poem.

    Can a novel virus teach
    What climate emergency so far have not?
    The interconnectedness of a global world
    No country beyond its reach
    Collective action the only sensible plot
    Work together without accusing insults hurled

    Can a novel virus show
    What’s closest to our hearts
    What we value most of all
    Do we dare accept, have courage to know
    Faithfully confess what we display in all our art
    Happiness only ever lay in following loving soul calls

    Can a novel virus reveal
    How compassionate living will be
    Only way out the materialistic maze
    Can we make a New Green Deal
    Accept responsibility humbly
    Changing our planet wrecking, extreme storm inducing ways?

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  8. The Virus ~ A Sonnet

    A sneeze from behind makes people cringe and turn
    to see what culprit’s spreading the disease.
    They’ve yet to call at night for dead to burn,
    but just wait ’til we’ve more fatalities.

    We ‘Mericans think we’re super powered
    to fend off almost any aggressor.
    But lately our record with wee foes has soured,
    or haven’t you noticed that, Professor?

    Now comes the smallest we’ve faced in a while,
    and folks worry about how serious.
    Heed your doctors, they won’t jive you with guile;
    just don’t listen to pols imperious.

    Wash hands, cover coughs, it’s not just the flu.
    So prepare, but don’t panic. I care ‘bout you.

    Liked by 6 people

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  9. I’ve visited many hospital rooms over the years, and occasionally, I was a patient. I’m always drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poem about her stay in a hospital following a surgical procedure.

    Tulips
    BY SYLVIA PLATH
    The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
    Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
    I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
    As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
    I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
    I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
    And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

    They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
    Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
    Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
    The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
    They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
    Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
    So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

    My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
    Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
    They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
    Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
    My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
    My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
    Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

    I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
    stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
    They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
    Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
    I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
    Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
    I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

    I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
    To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
    How free it is, you have no idea how free——
    The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
    And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
    It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
    Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

    The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
    Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
    Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
    Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
    They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
    Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
    A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

    Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
    The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
    Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
    And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
    Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
    And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
    The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

    Before they came the air was calm enough,
    Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
    Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
    Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
    Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
    They concentrate my attention, that was happy
    Playing and resting without committing itself.

    The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
    The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
    They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
    And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
    Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
    The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
    And comes from a country far away as health.

    Liked by 3 people

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  10. I ” NAME YOU FEAR”
    Like the wind, your exact birth is shadowy, even murky,
    But the flow, and rush, like an old bull, is marked by scores of bruises,
    Laughter is now whispered jest,
    Camaraderie is thinning like a slippery path,
    Ten fingers pointing at one location,
    Might we be missing the point?
    Like the wind on a sneeze,
    Breath carries death so they say,
    Goose pimples on a population that now hibernates indoors,
    Scrubbing hands behind masks to keep the stray bullets off the air waves,
    Palpable is FEAR rippling down the spines of the assumed healthy,
    Boarders shrinking before the eyes of a cruise ship afloat a memorable trip,
    Statistics roll out with diversity,
    Some minimizing, some maximizing,
    Along while back, we learnt a sweet investment called individualism,
    Fenced diffences against the onslaught of our privacy,
    Would the wind honor this paid service or even approve it?
    Death is a chief garantor of flesh after a time,
    It’s the fate of birth,
    But fear is the monster that serves deathness to the living,
    As we suffer shortage of basics in the war against a warring virus,
    Some have hoarded food supplies for a decade,
    Some are stocking distance for their own in remote homes,
    Some are breathing through masks In bunkers below the ground,
    History has a thing about life,
    Mans best intentions are tested by calamity,
    And the world has one right now,
    The morbid fear of catching a dreaded virus,
    That has already taken some down and has no respect for boundaries,
    How we die depends on how we live,
    If fear governs our senses enough to barricade ourselfs away from those in need,
    We shall for sure die,
    But before the physical,
    Our Soul will have died Twice over from fear,
    And thrice over from the meanness of withholding help to the needy, in an effort to preserve ourselves,
    So ” I name you fear”, O you colonial hunter of human health,
    And banish you to the deserts of dusty horizons,
    Where your barren unconcern must remain buried,
    To give man a chance at rebirth in the genuine concern of one facing this ultimate test of living,
    I ” name you fear” O you coward who escaped your masters rogue shed to shade the color of life a night without the dance of the stars,
    I ” name you fear” and tag you loser for records show others came before you and perhaps did worse,
    So we know we shall survive you for life is a survivor from the realms of amniotic fluids to the trenches of war,
    For life is held by a divine hand that constantly looks onto it wellness,
    So though unwelcome you came and may stay a bad season,
    Tomorrow is not yours except in records.
    And those too, shall remain in archival shelves,
    Once more to remind tomorrow that the human soul is a giant ,
    And indomitable to any spirit that is not from it’s maker.
    We shall suffer pain.
    We shall lose some.
    But we shall overcome the fear that you sow indifference that kills the living.

    Liked by 3 people

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  11. Dear Jamie, What a wonderful, empathetic post this is. It is both moving and frightening to be at the beginning of a pandemic, and I hope it will not impact you any more than absolutely necessary.

    >

    Liked by 3 people

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  12. NEVER NAMED copyright IRENE EMANUEL
    Chatter-clips in muffled murmurs
    overheard.
    Overt opinions in strained silence
    suspended.
    Tactful teacups in stilled saucers
    of tears.
    Reverberating reels of sudden shock
    echoing.
    Mystified minor in innocent ignorance
    unaware.
    Death danced in devilish delight
    unnamed.
    Years later, I learned about
    CANCER.

    A TOUCH OF CANCER copyright Irene Emanuel
    Unasked, unwanted, it appeared;
    a black dot on the middle of my right cheek.
    A spider bite? A probable assumption.
    It developed a white head,
    I squished it, it spurted and grew a scab.
    Then it became an unsightly scabby growth
    of potent ugliness, taking over my cheek.
    A skin specialist was consulted.
    He was fascinated, he concluded that this “spider bite”
    needed an investigation.
    He cut and sent a sliver to be biopsied.
    Final diagnosis:
    “Squamous Cell Carcinoma” of the cancerous type.
    Remedy:
    Immediate removal, non-negotiable.
    Twenty-one stitches later, the growth lay vanquished.
    As “Frankenstein’s” distant cousin, I faced the World.
    Vitamin E oil has finally smoothed the scar
    into a faded memory of a major scare.
    I am eternally grateful to faith and Dr. J.

    Liked by 3 people

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  13. My Caladrius

    All white bird a ghost who stares intently
    into my jaundiced eye,

    then flies towards sunblaze
    where it sweats all my illness
    in droplets to the earth.

    If the bird looks away
    this disease succeeds.

    Some healthy hide the bird
    under their coat,
    refuse to offer it
    with the thought
    nobody gets owt for free.

    Some say the bird is a saviour.
    Some put faith in fleeting things.

    (Previously published in “The Blue Mountain Review”)

    Liked by 3 people

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  14. Disease Is A Gift

    It was really cool to see who could get
    illest first, cos you’d like get all this fuss.
    My bestest mate Rhianna, reporters interviewed her, and she’d be on the news.

    And folk who felt sorry for her gave
    her lots of money so she could go
    to Disney in America and have
    the most expensive doctors,

    and like, get well, but she didn’t,
    and they wouldn’t let me see her,
    said she was too ill, and then
    she died and I cried a lot,

    she wasn’t on the news anymore
    but to me she was even famouser.

    From my “A World Where”, Nixes Mate Press, 2017

    Liked by 4 people

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      2. ..spoons..
        yes, we have been indoors a while now

        it has happened before, do you remember

        that year the snow came & i had to have a

        taxi to get there

        how all the guttering & aerials went with

        the weight of it

        suspension springs snapped

        then after everything was repaired

        some words we google then change

        the letters about to confirm with

        that which is deemed correct

        granny had special knives too, fish

        and butter and some others. on a

        rainy day she would let us play with them

        i still enjoy cutlery

        i am not called that, mine is more

        the usual without the d, however

        now he texts me i am abbreviated

        into gma

        which is cool

        i am enjoying being in so much

        yesterday i was already and coated

        then saw the snow warnings on the

        pass

        so made coffee and ate malt loaf

        the only other issue being some virus

        out there

        another reason, should i say excuse

        for staying home

        with my google assistant

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Thank you!