Inspired by the story of Petra Kormos.
One Of Forty Thousand
It’s Sweden, 2020.
Population:
A shade over ten million,
Ranking country’s population
By percent of Europe’s calculation
Sweden ranks as ninety-one.
Not many people one might think,
And they’d be right,
and yet,
Forty thousand humans yearly,
Life corrupted by a sepsis,
Interrupted by a virus,
Death an outcome or a nearly…
Limbs that blackened;
Life force slackened:
Source unknown;
And amputation!
I, one of the forty-thousand.
Coma housed, un-rouseable,
Hand defaced,
Erased forever, their profession.
No appeal or cry for pity. No confession
Only fact; a plain statistic:
Unemotional, un-egoistic,
‘Forty thousand’ makes it prime;
Time to make the virus traceable,
Follow up the un-erasable,
Taking sepsis off the table.
A task that’s not too much to ask,
As one sits fingerless
At the piano.
One Of Forty Thousand 9.3.2020 Circling Round Experience; Pure Nakedness II; Arlene Nover Corwin
*sepsis| noun [mass noun] Medicine
the presence in tissues of harmful bacteria and their toxins, typically through infection of a wound.
Arlene Corwin Poetry 