Now at last I feel that I can look your spirit in the eye
Now that at last the thing that poleaxed me back in January
Has been nailed down by a pin prick as the main event, the Plague,
That pig that left me sweating in freezing fits, embalmed in bed
In sulphurous miasmata, my joints like broken walnuts,
With hogtied eyeballs and less energy than dissipating smoke
Slowcooking me to Brexit Day, Pandemic’s damp squib warm up act.
Now at last I know it’s Covid, I can know that you’d be proud,
Proud in your quiet, unassailably determined way,
The way you were when I was eight and my endemic sore throat
Was, you proved, Coxsackievirus, by thrusting swabs deep down my throat
And drawing what seemed ponds of blood for growing cultures in your lab,
Also you’d be proud, I know, that I was in the avant garde,
Trend-setting and van guarding the whole farce by getting iller
Than I had for fifty years or more, than when I’d had Coxsackie,
Fashionably early, struck down when our ministry of cranks was
Still too busy wanking about wrong types of isolation,
Back when the only vector was to be some foreign other
Back when they wouldn’t test you til you’re cradled in Death’s radius
Since when I’ve told the whole world how my virologist father
Would be laughing now hysterically at their hoarded folly.
So I know the pride you’d feel in your adopted boy’s infection
Is bounced directly back, although you’re now sixteen years dead.
And I repeat to all who’ll listen how you told me in the 80s
When you’d overseen an autopsy on Britain’s second AIDS death
That epidemiologically you thought AIDS was a dull disease
And that, getting down to basics, nothing that you couldn’t catch
Standing fully clothed at a bus stop in broad daylight
Is all that much to worry you, if you take small precautions
But naturally, you added, the Establishment (the medical
As well as the political) assumed they’d smashed Infection
So the Isolation Hospitals sentinelling every town
Were closed, and as we spoke, now forty years ago, were bulldozed
To build neat estates of Barratt Homes, kindling Thatcherism,
Pump-priming the whole floating world of buy-to-let and outsourcing,
The neoliberal fantasy of privatising track and trace,
The brittle hollow edifice that’s left us 60,000 dead,
Tsunamied by a dream of greed, a fresh Somme for the veterans,
As if they’d built their New Jerusalem on a burial ground,
An uncleared Native Burial Ground. Yes, just exactly that.
And now at last that I can look your spirit in the eye
I see it twinkling because now we know we bloody told them so.