ManicDDaily

Memento (Aide Memoire)

Tile–pure tchotchke – the terra cotta
Southern California’s sierra/
siesta/sonesta style, with snoozer in sombrero
beneath a palm.

Below, a jaunty “howdy” greets
at a slant, with a dashed
date from ’77, which make me think not
somehow
of ’77–though that the year when Grethe
Rask, Danish surgeon who’d worked
in Zaire, died so strangely–but
of the next ten years,
when thousands died, tens
of thousands, as politicians
of Terra Cotta, SoCal and beyond, snoozed
determinedly beneath waved palms, proclaiming,
when not plain silent, moral failings, medical
misinformation, howdy
 doody, their own
damned fault.

Sores
wept, bones
bared, lungs
drowned, and with the sores, bones,
lungs, were blanked
so many eyes and hands and hearts
that lit the world with sparks
and sparkling,
and those too who perhaps
lit only a few
dark nights, too few, too
many.

Honestly, I can barely stand
to look
at this tile, sun baked so carelessly
into its squared veneer, yet rub
my finger over its gloss
as if to trace there
that lost time; howdy, howdy.

*******************************

A rather emotional (sorry) reading of the poem:

Here’s a draft draft draft poem for dVerse Poets Pub Poetics Prompt hosted by the wonderful Claudia Schoenfeld, and featuring evocative photos, one of which I’ve posted above, by Mobius Faith a/k/a Terry Amstutz.

My nanowrimo novel, if I ever get it written, takes place in the mid-80s or so, so I’ve been thinking about that time, which was when the AIDS epidemic hit. Ronald Reagan, elected as President in 1980, serving till 1989, mentioned the word AIDS in only one speech in 1987.  I’m not saying this to be partisan; it’s a fact from a complex and very sad period. The CDC reports that in the U.s. there were approximately 50,000 reported cases of AIDS in the U.S. between 1981 and 1987, 48,000 deaths. Between 1988 and 1992, there were another 202,502 U.S. cases reported, 180,000 deaths.   Of course, there were (and are) many many more cases  and deaths worldwide and into the present.

I should add as a process note that Grethe Rask was one of the first confirmed cases of AIDS (in a non-Afridan) though the cause of her death was not known until a few years after her death as AIDS had not been identified as such in 1977.  She is likely to have been exposed performing surgeries in Zaire.