November 2017
I am offering a poem that is a bit more serious this month. I teach my high school students about the origin of AIDS and about the reign of King Leopold in the Congo Free State, and the ways in which these two events overlap. I finally felt compelled to write it out in a poem. I also have a new website: https://www.sylviacavanaugh.com
Mutation
You might not want me to tell you
about King Leopold
but I’m going to tell you anyway.
it’s about a bodacious land grab
in the forested
breathing breast of Africa
Conrad’s heart bled black ink
on a white page
and by white I mean a soulless
Belgian king who never set foot
who needed Victorian sex advice
from Aunty V herself
who commanded the likes of Kurtz
it’s about red rubber, slavery, and ivory
women peeled open by bosses
for many men to share
it’s about slumped doctors
of innocuous inoculations
fretting over too few syringes
for many men to share
there’s a colony of chimps on location
pan troglodyte troglodytes
(yes, these exact chimps)
and hungry hunters wounded
its about how a simian virus
needled for weeks
in the blood of captive humans
human humans
deficient systems
deficient human immune
systems
human imuno
imuno deficiency
a deficient virus
becomes a human virus
human immunodeficiency virus
© 2017 Sylvia Cavanaugh
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