You wiped a fever-brow, you burned the cloth.
You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop.
What wouldn’t burn you boiled like applesauce
out beside the shed in the copper pot.
Apple, lightwood, linen, feather-bed—
it was the smell of that time, that neighborhood.
All night the pyre smouldered in the yard.
Your job: to obliterate what had been soiled.

But the bitten heart no longer cares for risk.
The orthodox still passed from lip to lip
the blessed relic and the ritual cup.
To see in the pile the delicate pillowslip
she’d worked by hand, roses and bluets—as if
hope could be fed by giving up—

§

Sweet are the songs of bitterness and blame,
against the stranger spitting on the street,
the neighbor’s shared contaminated meal,
the rusted nail, the doctor come too late.

Sweet are the songs of envy and despair,
which count the healthy strangers that we meet
and mark the neighbors’ illness mild and brief,
the birds that go on nesting, the brilliant air.

Sweet are the songs of wry exacted praise,
scraped from the grave, shaped in the torn throat
and sung at the helpful stranger on the train,
and at the neighbors misery brought near,
and at the waters parted at our feet,
and to the god who thought to keep us here.

§

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.