Contact Tracing
May 4 2009


The epidemiology of fear.

There is no index case,
its reach vast
its onset lost;
breaking-out in back alleys,
the chants of mobs.

We debate its origin —
innate, or contagion,
a cultural artefact.

For you, it began
in terrible silence,
the scant seconds before she cried
— how such little time
could seem so endless.
Her first breath
tiny and wet,
bruised all over.

In the middle
you imagined yourself immune,
love or faith or strength
your antidote.
But by old age
you felt it again,
the endemic fear of death
gnawing away at you —
what comes next,
how you will be taken.

They say fear prepares us for survival
inoculates against complacency.
We learn to live with it,
and some days, even forget —
a chronic affliction,
the human condition,
wired-in
to our DNA.

While the fearless die young.
The rest of us
feeling envious,
but careful not to touch.


I imagine it's pretty obvious where this came from! Lots of talk now about pandemics, about the epidemiology of disease, about the race between unreasonable fear and contagion.

Of course, fear of one sort or another accompanies us all through our lives, so the message here isn't exactly earth-shattering. The pleasure in writing the poem was a more a stylistic one: weaving in all the references to illness and the study of disease. And of course, compressed into such a short piece, the allusions to social pathology; the movement from the moment of birth, to the verge of death.