Plague by Robert Knox

I did not intend these jottings

to become 'a journal of the plague year'

It spoils everything, you know,

those who come after will look back in horror

No one (almost) alive today remembers the

            Spanish flu of an age before

I think of die-offs among the birds

     and reptiles

amphibians disappearing from Earth's roster

as if at the wave of some evil magician's wand

(we who hold this power

            and wave it still)

billions of warm-blooded mammals,

our evolutionary mates and forebears

routinely slaughtered

to fill our ceaseless hunger for more

We the People of More

the endless hunger that consumes the planet

loveless,

and seeking even more of that

which we do not truly need

to fill the hole

dug into our souls for that

     which we truly do,

a chasm deep and vast

as that grand canyon

into which to pour the offal

of lands reduced to rubble

Someday perhaps we will fill those craters

with corpses

I can nominate a few priorities 

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, Unlikely Stories, and others. His poetry chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He was named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.