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The virus spreads
through inhalation
and aspiration...
we wear flimsy
blue paper masks
to cover our mouths,
but the virus spreads
freely and unseen,
in shopping malls,
on buses and in subways -
empty seats still warm
from another body.
It spreads
in the cracks of crumbling walls
of derelict buildings,
and in antiseptic boardrooms
of glass office towers,
it creeps and suddenly appears
cryptic as the spray paint
on underpasses.
The virus spreads
online and offline,
it spreads between lines
of publicly-funded
poetry journals
that no one reads,
and in classrooms
like an identity crisis
like a piety
like self-righteousness.
The virus spreads -
changes normal people
into rabid zombies,
raving street-mutterers,
mouth-foaming flag-wavers
chanting dogma
in wretched syllables,
delirious dialects
of catchy slang
rhyming bloody murder.
The cable news shows
take sides;
The expert panels
confuse;
The audience
buries its head
as the virus spreads
like a conspiracy.
4 comments:
Anti-Semitism is often compared to a virus, constantly mutating, taking on different forms and expressions from place to place and from generation to generation. Although the indelible memory of COVID with its "flimsy blue paper masks" provides the expected opening trope of this poem, the poem takes off in different, unexpected directions, and is ultimately a damning statement, I think, on our current zeitgeist on campuses and on the streets, the "raving street-mutterers,/mouth-foaming flag-wavers/chanting dogma/in wretched syllables,/delirious dialects/of catchy slang/rhyming bloody murder". The biased news channels and the sanitized poetry journals -- these either help facilitate the spread of the virus, or are, perhaps, another form of the virus itself. There are a few lines I would change in the poem (e.g. "The audience buries its head"), but it also has some terrific lines that I adore, starting with the double-meaning of "aspiration" in the first stanza! The stanza that begins "It spreads/in the cracks of crumbling walls ..." is perfection! This is a great poem --- I have been reading and re-reading it over and over again, and it gets better with each reading!
We seem to be in an age besieged by spreading virus's from Covid, to balme/hatred, to misinformation and disinformation, to malware and ransomware (my company and and tenant of ours were hit in the last two weeks.) I might add to the list the rampant spread and epidemics of social media contagions of fear, outrage, denial, disilluionment and despair. I wish hope and optimism would spread as widely and as fast.
Perhaps the spread of hope and optimism is part of the mantle of poetry?
Do you think that may be why poetry is so out of fashion these days?
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