When Ebola’s fever begins to rage,
The prognosis isn’t nice,
Monoclonal antibodies
are needed from three mice.
The mice must first become exposed
to a weakened viral strain.
Their antibodies harvested
and combined with those of man.
Strangely the proteins that we need
are grown best in a ****.
A modified tobacco plant
will do the job indeed.
The serum, that derives from plants,
had not had human trials.
(but eight of ten young chimpanzees
endorse  what’s in that vial.)
Our missionaries, sick unto death
were clearly in no position
to refuse to try the medicine
that might provide remission.
Their rebound was miraculous.
To Atlanta now they fly.
Man finds himself in debt to a mouse.
“Good job, little guy!”

An Aussie Couple in their middle years
had despaired of children of their own.
To fill that empty room at home
They would need a womb on loan.

A Young Thai woman without a mate
agreed to be their surrogate.
To spare them from a childless fate
Ten Thousand was the going rate.

Fraternal twins, a boy and girl,
were implanted in the Surrogate.
The little girl, a perfect child.
Her brother faced a darker fate.

A child with Down’s is often slain
before they see the light of day.
Identified pre natally,
They are aborted right away.

The surrogate, in awe of God,
would not accede to such a fate.
The “Parents” refused the “damaged goods”
and were “understandably” irate.

His “parents” wouldn’t take him home
Due to his mismatched chromosomes.
His surrogate who gave him birth
became his only friend on Earth.

One child accepted, one denied;
They say “He is no child of mine!”
The surrogate will raise him as her own;
Though he be less than kin she’s more than kind.

From every county of old
Ireland
The stones have come to speak again.
Joined together in these four walls
They tell the tale of vanished men.
One million dead, the Hunger’s harvest
A million more fled overseas.
The potatoes, on which they depended,
Lay rotting in the Irish fields
It was a hard death they endured;
Their sentence passed by
falling
yields.
The stones cry out, the stones remember
the shadows of the hunger slain.
They curse the British who dissembled
Who showed less mercy than the rain.
They cry out loudest for the children;
The bairns of that famished land.
Their mother’s arms, their only coffin.
their sole possession was their names.

In Whitehall stands a monument,
A column wrought in stone.
Empty as that mother’s heart
whose sons did not come home.
It bears the dates of two world wars,
And three carved words I read.
A politician’s shibboleth
About “the Glorious Dead”
Standing in November’s rain,
No glory came to mind.
Perhaps that word held meaning
in another place and time.
They have passed from living memory
those soldier boys of thine.
Now bronze reliefs and marble wreaths
Recall their deaths to mind.

Imagine yourself a red ceramic Poppy,
placed with care into the English soil.
One hundred years ago you were a soldier,
a frightened teen in a chaotic world.
You’d been sent, by King’s command, into the battle-
A mindless melee John French thought he’d won.
Perhaps some yards of France had been reclaimed
at a mind numbing cost of mothers’ sons.
You were one of those shot, gassed or burned.
Hit by a shell and blown to kingdom come.
(In ‘fourteen they had funerals for the fallen.
Mass burials became the norm before Verdun.)
That’s how you went from the playing fields of Eton
to an unmarked grave somewhere in Northern France.
So now you are a red ceramic poppy,
a symbol of an Empire, now passed.
Placed in English soil by teenaged hands.
one of nine hundred thousand home at last.

I look  upon the Fields of France
and see her scars a century old.
The fading craters made by shells;
the trench lines where they fought and died.
No star shells now disturb the night
No need to fumble for gas masks.
No "No -man's Land" between the wires.
No butchery mars these fields of France.

In Nineteen Fourteen, in July
with declarations by old men,
A generation went to war
and most would not see home again.
In muddy trenches rats grew fat.
Whistles sounded the hopeless charge.
Machine guns made a mince of men.
At Verdun, alone, a million dead.

This is now and that was then,
but this is, in truth, a fragile peace.
Hatred simmers, oaths are sworn,
I sense the battle lines are drawn.
The lamp lights flicker now as then.
Will butchery mar these fields again?

Living a long lifetime without love,
I had forgotten what confidence was-
But confidence was reclaimed
by her warm summer rain.

Life in the desert can be hard at times.
I had my reasons but none of them rhymed.
but my desert was briefly reclaimed
by her warm summer rain.

When it rains in the desert the wildflowers bloom
And the night air is sweetened with hints of perfume
The desert is utterly changed
by her warm summer rain.

Wildflowers are fleeting, sand always endures.
I’ll choose to remember wildflowers’ allure.
I’ll always remember her name
And her warm summer rain