March 14: Pandemic Panic, Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Kyrie"

Since true pandemic panic took hold in my little corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this week, I have found myself turning to one particular poet:  Ellen Bryant Voigt.  She published a collection of poems titled Kyrie in the early 1990s.  It's about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. 

I have begun rereading this book, remembering how beautiful Voigt's writing is.  It's a book that captures the human side of tragedy and manages, somehow, to instill a sense of some kind of hope, as well.  It's brilliant.  I once went to a reading Voigt gave in Kalamazoo.  She read sections from the unpublished manuscript of Kyrie, and she had the audience breathless and rapt by the end. 

Saint Marty has decided, over the course of the next few weeks, to share this collection with you, one poem at a time.  Just because . . .

Epigraph:

Nothing else--no infection, no war, no famine--
has ever killed so many in as short a period.
                     Alfred Crosby
                    America's Forgotten Pandemic:
                    The Influenza of 1918

Prologue:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;
after five, juniper and birch,
alders filling in among the briars;
ten more years, maples rise and thicken;
forty years, the birches crowded out,
a new world swarms on the floor of the hardwood forest.
And who can tell us where there was an orchard,
where a swing, where the smokehouse stood?