Coronavirus (COVID-19) 2020, or the Natural History of Disease (poem)

Coronavirus 2020, world-wide pandemic,
Called natural disaster, animal-human transfer,
Perhaps in China but as old as the Agricultural Revolution,
When people settled in towns and cities,
Groups large enough for infectious disease
To spread like an open prairie grass fire.
Natural history of disease – like I learned in fifth grade.

Who would think we humans are part
Of nature that shapes the course of nature?
Consider Donald J. Trump, Presidential Oracle
Of the United States, who, like Wagner’s Norns,
Foretells because he is all-knowing.
Our presidential oracle possesses unprecedented power
To know the truth and impose it.

So with the coronavirus plague, that seemed to begin
Its dread journey of sickness and death
In Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
For some two and a half months,
Our presidential oracle knew better
Than to heed earlier warnings about the certainty of a pandemic.
He wrote off any imminent danger. This virus was just like
Ordinary flu and would quickly pass, he assured us.
With the sweep of a pen, he dismissed
Cadres of public health experts abroad
And from his closest councils here.
I’m a businessman, he reminded us:
Who needs to pay so many people
To sit around and do nothing?
Dams everywhere began to burst;
Our presidential oracle noticed only the trickle.
When he at last acknowledged the grave danger,
Its cause was everyone else’s fault: a plot
By his political foes to defeat him. He called
The pandemic, “The Chinese Virus,” theirs,
As though they inflicted it on us.
The presidential oracle, great builder of walls,

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Unwittingly left our door open
And let the pestilence in.

Who knows how many thousands of people
Would become gravely ill and die
Because our presidential oracle believed only himself?
Surely, I am more infallible than any science!

If the presidential oracle
Has shaped part of the history
Of the disease, how entirely natural, then,
Is the history of the coronavirus?

Sometimes, natural history
Of disease is not entirely natural.
The prairie fire is already there –
We supply the gasoline and ignition.

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