Plague

“Death puts an end to your distress.

Read, traveler, what evil fate…”

cut in stone by Arent Passer, 1602

A wax board inscribed with a stylus

flaps against history’s stone tablet,

sticky and blind with age, poverty’s

almost illegible, yellow fate.

Monks collect tithes for redemption seals,

beating books, reading black numbers to

ignorant boys whose apprentice weals

rise like the baker’s twice-measured dough.

Masters, the members of guilds, raise pint

tankards to barrels, sacks, tombstones, chests,

lower their scepters like proclaimed saints

on fetid almshouses, clot-black death.

Weathervanes spin… here, windward axes,

there, wind way fortifications. Clocks

are wound as regular as taxes.

Wounds are staunched with tears and tattered flags.

Leeches the blood of the journeyman

into the crude, carved wax—wet, scarlet—

“Beware of crusaders, Samaritans!

Read this; take heed of my dire couplet:

Flee in haste; stay gone long.

Return when they are gone.”

Tallinn, Estonia

April 9, 2002