When A Grown Child Dies

by Aurelia D.Wallace

After the Black Death, after
Lister, after doctors learned
To wash their hands
---Began to hope
The bloodied spawn might live,
Might starve, for once, the empty plots
In family graveyards
(Birth ten, get four
if you are lucky)
The natural extravagance
of evolution
---Kept on hoping
After polio, after Salk,
After Spock, Gesell, and Gerber,
How better it would be,
A queer economy,
If babies lived
---When my turn
Came, given the laws of probability,
(Buy one, get one free)
---Came to expect
Him to live to grown,
Marry, produce his own,
Bury his mama and daddy
Instead of babies
Under the family's whited stones
---But when
grown child dies...
B