WHAT YOU HAVEN’T LEARNED

Didn’t I send you a language of plague?
Black Death? Verbs from Exodus, 
and what you call the Spanish Flu
that wasn’t Spanish at all? The baleful adjectives
of tuberculosis? Horror-stricken nouns of Ebola?
Alphabet of woe you chose to disregard?

Except those worn-out, pain-ridden,
frightened and fleeing migrants, refugees
—and old women who scrub my floors
and staircases, wash the sheets
and the blankets (even if they break
ice to get to the river water)

and who wrote for me that funny prayer
thanking me for all the holes in the human body
which when they work together, form a most
exquisitely useful symphony. These women know
because they clean the odorous disgusting
messes when the balance tilts.

But you didn’t listen to them either. Rarely
even noticed them as you rushed up the stairs
late for an appointment, dragging dust and dirt
with you from the street, thinking only about time
and money. Your wheel of fortune. Knowledge,
I gave you freely, science and medicine.

Quick and hesitant change taught me patience,
honed my ways of seeing, showed me how time
works although it rarely affects me as me
myself to quote the great Bard of the Civil War
who so acutely expressed his god, the wondrous
Script found even in my smallest leaf of grass.

I who speak Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek,
and most other dead or ancient tongues
keep track of how the meaning of words
change, sometimes violently in a second,
sometimes slowly, the way a waterfall
shapes a stone in its path.

PUBLISHED IN ABRIDGED, LILITH, BAD DREAMS