Jim Dawson
Quelques poèmes: The World's Smallest Violin, THE SEVENTH DAY, The Virus
See this? Look! Fingers, white knuckled,
Convulse on the unseen strings
Of the world's smallest violin.
It plays for me (poor dumb I am),
A fool to try to speak.
It's all been said before, I think.
If not, it matters not a hoot.
Blood courses yet in old channels, but
What am I to dare to speak?
I tremble at my nerve.
The skeleton crawls beneath the flesh;
The pendant shaft, pale and shrivelled, shrinks.
Soft flesh and solid bone, but
Even this shall pass.
God rested on the seventh day,
His labours nearly done.
He sat Him down to rest awhile -
It really had been fun.
He always meant to finish up -
So little left to do!
But somehow He forgot this world,
P'raps started on a new.
So this, our world, rolls on in time
According to His plan,
A pleasant place by all accounts
Excepting, always, man .
Alone of all God's living things
Man shapes his children's fate,
With spear and club and slicing steel,
A legacy of hate.
If only God had stuck around
And acted as our guide,
He might have given us a hand
To stop the downhill slide.
Yet here and there small groups of men
Keep trying undismayed
To make this world a better place,
The one He would have made.
Though no Egyptian stamped its name in clay or recorded its existence on papyrus,
I suggest that mightier than the germ by far is this thing we call a virus.
A germ fathers its kind by sort of normal means within our nasal passages,
Whereas a virus begets its offspring with no benefit of precoital massages.
It uses us for dietary and some genetic needs it's lacking
And doing so it leaves us feverish, sneezing, wheezing, and very often hacking.
And as as oft has been all too clearly stated,
We no sooner have the virus beat when we find the gosh darn thing's mutated.
Vaccines, pills, and deep I.M. injections
Are often all as nought if a virus is intent on giving one infections.
That, my firend is why I say if fate intends me to be sick,
A germ and not a kinky virus clearly has to be my pick.
Retour au Club In-Folio.