A Covid Triptych
by Nancy Baenziger
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Covirion At first, I was but a whisper coasting on the icy winter wind. You heard, but you didn’t listen. My friends, while you quarreled I was waiting with my grinning death’s head hid behind my hands. You have dallied far too long and here I am. |
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Consequences
One time the timelines hung in space poised and convergent for how brief a passage till the solar wind blew softly past and drew back the curtain on chaos. Shaken awake by the snake curled, hissing, around the trunk while grownups whispered a melisma on the market price of apples with grave faces. So too each subsequent new ecological niche, bright link in the chain of being gains again, the resonance with overtones unheard in the hermit’s cell. The Garden gate stands ajar upon a finite road where sine waves pass in graceful arches echoing in antiphon the Lachrymae Pavane. |
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Neanderthal We were a patient people…… pardon me, a patient hominin. Many hundred thousand years we lived small in numbers, mostly in peace, coping with the cold just fine. We knew and loved beauty, like you do, created it ourselves, mourned our dead and sought for them a safe passage. We made progress, innovations; everyone always wants to leave their stamp on the world. Loutish beetle-browed brutes? Not so much. Took you 52,000 years to figure that out. So, our Y chromosome vanished, the male one, but not the female one and not the autosomes either. Outcompeted? Discouraged into oblivion? You think? You took our women. You took them by force, figuring they were there for the taking in a four-letter word. Down the march of history our nucleotides have dispersed among the new ones. And now the domain of the disinherited strikes back. |
