July 5: Out of the Woods, Infection Records, Poem from "Kyrie"

I do think Ellen Bryant Voigt's poetry collection Kyrie has a lot to teach in this time of pandemic.  The poems, a series of sonnets about the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions of people, speak both to the desperation and humanity of that epidemic.  Bryant puts names and faces with the history, and, in doing so, creates a tapestry that really speaks to our current times.

As I've said in a few recent posts, we aren't out of the woods yet with Covid-19, despite all of the citizens of this country who flocked to beaches and fireworks displays yesterday in celebration of Independence Day.  A few months ago, you couldn't buy a bag of Cheetos without encountering neighbors and friends wearing masks and gloves, keeping a six-foot bubble around themselves.  Now, masks are scarce in public places, and mask-wearing has become a political issue, rather than a health issue.

In short, people have lost their minds.

Other countries across the planet have closed their borders to people of the United States, including Mexico and the European Union.  Instead of freedom and democracy, our nation is now famous for setting daily coronavirus infection records.  Over 50,000 yesterday.  Yes, the death rates are trending down, but we are only in the first or second week of this summer surge.

I'm simply stumped.  I don't get how a country as advanced as the United States in medicine and technology can be so far behind the curve in fighting one of the greatest threats the modern world has ever faced.  It doesn't give me a whole lot of hope for the rest of this year.

Of course, I may be wrong.  I hope I'm wrong.  I don't want to be right, and I will be the first to apologize publicly to all you non-maskers out there if Covid-19 miraculously disappears.  (Let me repeat:  over 50,000 new infections for the THIRD STRAIGHT DAY IN A ROW in the United States.)

Until that time of miraculous healing, if you see me on the street, I will be wearing a mask.  If you run into me at a store, I will greet you from a six-foot distance.  And I will pray for all of you, laugh with all of you, and hope with all of you.

And for that miracle of hope for togetherness, Saint Marty gives thanks.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Who said the worst was past, who knew
such a thing?  Someone writing history,
someone looking down on us
from the clouds.  Down here, snow and wind:
cold blew through the clapboards,
our spring was frozen in the frozen ground.
Like the beasts in their holes,
no one stirred--if not sick
exhausted or afraid.  In the village,
the doctor's own wife died in the night
of the nineteenth, 1919.
But it was true:  at the window,
every afternoon, toward the horizon,
a little more light before the darkness fell.