| Rx Poetry |
Pandemic Without Parents & Pandemic Without Grandparents
two poems by Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Pandemic Without Parents
In purgatory the oldest hurts come back first.
Now I know how my father felt fifty years ago
when my mother was put away indefinitely.
She was gone for three weeks, or months,
or years; we lost track in the evenings, as
my father cooked instant soup and tried
his hand at washing. This is what the scientists
mean when they talk about simultaneous
time, relativity, their theories of strings
and multi-verses; what psychologists say
no one can escape, the foundational moments,
the warped template. My father could never
manage to separate the whites from the reds,
the scalding temperatures my mother preferred
for all laundry from the colors and synthetics,
the dresses my sister and I were forced to wear
no matter how valiantly each day we protested.
Five-thousand, seven-hundred and some odd
amount of the years’ partitioning of the sexes
had to add up to something, and his girls were
going to stick with this division. No pants,
trousers, shorts at school. No bare feet or
sneakers, nothing of manly habits or tom
boy grooming. My father talked in those days
about Pearl Harbor and FDR, how he couldn’t
have anticipated the surprise attack, though
I contend there are always signs, secret
debriefings, pieces of intelligence ignored,
like bits of lace made brittle as they decompose,
like my mother’s wedding dress, retrieved
from its deep storage. My mother the Army
brat, who wanted a home, made great plans
every night—Librarian? Architect? President
of the PTA?—only to feel them dissolve as
her family awoke to claim all her industry
at daybreak. Should I fault my father for not
stocking up on canned vegetables, frozen
meats, Cap’n Crunch cereal? Or should
he have paid attention to a woman deprived
of a chance to live as we civilians do,
and take for granted: unaware or believing
history is what happens to other people.
Pandemic Without Grandparents
I always knew which side I was on
when I watched the war on television.
My grandmother studied mathematics
and I liked to show her I could tell
whose casualty counts were greater
or less than, whose were equivalent,
who was ahead in prisoners of war
and missing-in-actions, without
accounting for hearts and minds,
of course. She was an Army officer’s
wife and understood those were
never part of the official calculations.
Once, we spotted a hand reach
above the anchorman’s desk
with a late breaking bulletin.
We laughed so hard we lost
whatever that data was. My mother
admonished us for our hysterics
because we could have been
wearing out the old woman’s
heart, her valves and hydraulics
long since compromised by a
childhood bout of streptococcus.
You can guess who lost that battle
of attrition, with the years spent
in nightgowns, housecoats,
and slippers, though she was
never so defeated as either
one of my parents, terminally
in pajamas, even in daylight.
I look at my own hands now,
skin bracing for the next round
of disinfecting, and they appear
as hers, the face of a mountain
scarred by seismic changes
in a silence enforced by
the scope of geologic thinking;
and I begin to know how much
fear my grandmother must have
stifled in the prior wars and outbreaks,
the lull and panic in her chest
without ever breathing words
of distress to anyone.
