Dear Coronavirus,
What made you decide to leap
from the bats to the pangolins?
Was it the bat diet of insects?
Was it the bats’ habit of
eating on the fly?
Why did you choose the pangolin
for your next host?
Was it the sound of their name,
jingling like wind chimes,
Pan-Go-Lin, Pan-Go-Lin, Pan-Go-Lin?
Was it their layered scales,
creating a fearsome surface,
protection from predators?
What made you move on to
humans?
Was it the variety of our innards?
Was it our larger size,
more meal in one place?
What attracted your proteins
to our proteins?
What made us so tasty to you?
What lured your spiky proteins
into our lungs?
Don’t you understand that when
you weave your webs inside
our lungs,
you kill us, and you must
find another human host?
Why is the mindless replication
of your proteins so necessary?
Why have you declared war
on humanity?
What will you do when
you’ve killed us all?
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It's National Poetry Month! Poetry is hard, but I keep trying. The
pandemic has set my theme for this month. You can sign up for Poem-a-Day
and find out about all sorts of online poetry celebrations at the Academy of American Poets website
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