"AIDS, Among Other Things"

AIDS, Among Other Things

The wages of sin is death. These words run
With a quiet persistence in my brain,
As though that biblical archaic phrase
Had been precisely meant to diagnose
What’s bothering an unreligious man

Like me today. The blasphemy was met
By sins of silence, cowardice and doubt,
And so we muddied what clear light might thresh
The good from the bad or merely foolish
When the consequences begin to hit.

I fear that we have too glibly mocked
For too long in the word and in the act
To hope we’ve any second chances owed
Or plead extenuation when we’re paid
The wages we knew always to expect.

We acquiesce to birth-in-bottles now,
Dissimulate on every law we knew
Was solemn in the covenants we had
With whatever we call Nature or God,
Yet we never think to reap what we sow.

The ills multiply as we unlearn
That ancient wise humility of men
Who saw, beyond the wreckage of taboos,
Despair and madness, hatred and disease—
The promised payment in the promised coin.

             from Freedom to Breathe
            © Peter Kocan