March 25: So Many Questions, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Childbed Fever

Where did all this start? 

In Wuhan?  In an open meat market?

With a young man who came down with a fever?  A grandmother who had a persistent, hacking cough?

When will it end?  Hundreds of thousands dead?  Unemployment at 30 percent?  Blood red sunsets?

So many questions.

Saint Marty has no answers.

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

When it was time to move, he didn't move,
he lay athwart his mother.  She pushed and pushed--
she'd had a stone before, she wanted a child.

Reaching in, I turned him like a calf.
Rob gave her a piece of kindling wood,
she bit right through.  I turned him twice.

Her sisters were all in the house, her brother
home again on leave--
                                     in the months to come
in the cities there would be families
reported their terminals and fled,
                                                 volunteers
would have to hunt the dying door-to-door.

It started here with too many breech and stillborn,
women who looked fifty not thirty-two.
I marked it childbed fever in my log.