We say, it will be different after

[source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/]

We say, it will be different after.
We say, this is shaking us up.
The worst is coming. The best is coming.
There were plagues before,
ever since we started lording it over nature.
Ever since we expelled ourselves out of wilderness, that paradise
and started cultivating, churning earth, planting seeds,
felling trees, turning forests into enemies and forgetting, over time, the secret remedies hidden there - ever since we picked some beasts and made ourselves their owners
penned them in while they lived and killed them for their meat.

The Bible is full of plagues. All ancient texts,
all languages have them, as familiar as illness
and a part of human cultures,
with its words, books, foods and medicines.
Plagues arrived along with historical memory.

But something strange has happened.
We have forgotten all about them. We need prodding,
archival footage, documents and articles,
to remember the plagues of not long ago,
1957, 1968, remember? No, I don't.
But 1918, yes. And this one, one in a century,
we shall never forget, there is a before, and an after.

We will forget. Living in the midst of a plague,
there is only the plague. Nothing else remains,
everything is fragile, life, ways of life, structures we thought solid,
but knew they weren't, you see, I told you so,
all that is solid melts into air, remember?

After a crisis, we forget. Great pain is not for memory,
only pleasure is. (We forget how hard it was to labour the earth
when we eat the bread.)
And so, this time too we will forget.
Because it will have lasted such a short time
within the general scheme of things.
What is a year or two, a blip in history a dip in the books, when shops close for good
and people line up for food -

but it happened, it did, some 60 years ago, yet that pain
that crisis, those dead
are forgotten.

Our sense of time is the problem. We feel the duration now
but once it is behind us - it will be behind us - then

Then what?
Then the slow duration of world extinction will be news again
everyday the news of ecological demise
slow, constant, with a beginning but without an end

Not an episode, not a bit of history
but the stuff of everything we know
the product of culture, the trees we fell
the lives we lead when plague does not force us
to stay home.

But if again we forget what this one was like,
then nothing will change and time will start again as before
and then what - I'd rather not say

Paris, 20 April 2020