Revelry will be ours,
In Tiber too,
When madness ebbs and the hunger game ends
With a dance that tests your bravery to embrace
A future not so grim
It will be yours and hers,
Theirs and his,
All of ours, made to exist in a perpetual six-foot Inferno
of I-Can’t-Take-Any-More-of-This
We are The Pandemics,
Providers of history’s next chapter on Who’d-a-Guessed?
The Hoaxsters and The Immortals
whose fearlessness against fact enshrines them
as eternity’s dopey jests
The Soothsayers and Doomsdayers
who will forever own this hollow win
The Sirens of Science and Heroes of Medicine
a battalion of goodness semaphoring the blind
The Dead, The Dead, The Dead,
buried, too many, without adulation, nor grace, nor light
We are the victims of hubris and Trump,
Textbook fools who could’ve and should’ve
To dodge peril, duck disgrace
In hope’s horizon, the torment stems,
and we rejoice again,
Speaking words of wisdom
while stomping a microscopic fiend to the beat,
A group, we caress,
Our circle of backs still bristles from the chill
We pause at dawn, here and there,
New Rochelle and Bergamo,
Wuhan and El Paso,
At last, it is gone,
Yet we cling in silence, each of us wary
of what one cool droplet, a splash of water
from a neighbor’s pore, might again cause
Adrian Brijbassi 