The Virus
The Virus
...takes on many shapes.
Oran,
Wuhan,
New York
or Dayton...
Did the virus originate
in only one place and time?
The mind says yes,
but the heart knows better.
Plague is an old story,
written into the fossil record,
coded into our DNA,
whispered like a rumor
passed from tree to tree
by the slow breeze
needing to exhale.
A fungus killed the Gros Michel banana.
Dutch elm disease wiped out forests.
And now the Emerald Ash borer
feeds its away across the land.
Covid-19
reminds us suffering
is the pandemic.
...it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and... perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.
~ Albert Camus
(last line of "The Plague" - 1947)
