The ghost of life: we had no lambs

Ignorant gobshites have compared the novel coronavirus with seasonal flu in their attempts to deny the seriousness of this pandemic. Some whose ignorance is truly gobsmacking toss around the influenza pandemic of 1918 (or, as Cadet Bonespurs keeps stating, 1917) as though it’s a record for despair they aspire to break.

Here’s the horror of 1918: the flu attacked the young and healthy. The men who’d survived the trenches, the machine guns and the gas returned home to be mown down by the virus. It cut like a scythe through the flower of the future. You could be feeling fine at breakfast and dead by supper. It took out more people than four years of total war in Europe. And it did not care how rich you were. It went where it wanted and took what it pleased.

We have a ways to go before the dead are measured in tens of millions from COVID19, but unless you stay the fuck at home, it’s not going to care how much your investment banker sucks up to you.

Although, so far, I’m betting the hardest hit are those who are on the edges of society; the homeless, the poor, the uninsured, the out-of-work, the minimum-waged, the non-whites.

My entry for National Poetry Month today is from a contemporary poet, Ellen Bryant Voight, from a collection she published in 1995 focused on the 1918 influenza pandemic. The book is called Kyrie; the poem is untitled.

How we survived: we locked the doors

and let nobody in. Each night we sang.

Ate only bread in a bowl of buttermilk.

Boiled the drinking water from the well,

clipped our hair to the scalp, slept in steam.

Rubbed our chests with camphor, backs

with mustard, legs and thighs with fatback

and buried the rind. Since we had no lambs

I cut the cat’s throat, Xed the door

and put the carcass out to draw the flies.

I raised an upstairs window and watched them go—

swollen, shiny, black, green-backed, green-eyed—

fleeing the house, taking the sickness with them.