For months and days before the plague,

I wrote and spoke so much about its coming;

Now it is here, and I can neither speak nor write.

The silence in my head is deafening.

They would not heed me, then or now.

The crowds roar, frantic, run this way or that.

I watch them, wordless, helpless to warn them—

It is almost unbearable.

This is the wretched view from here:

Two worlds collide and shatter daily.

They rise anew, intact, hell-bent

To break the following day.

New horror: pressure from outside,

To open, to return

To things remembered from Before.

No change in circumstance, or cure,

Or means to measure what IS, now—

The dictum from on high.

And so I watch, alone, aghast

At headlong rushing to erase

The strictures holding plague at bay–

Canute demanding of the waves

Obedience, thinking he can

Hold their sway.