While wrens, one by one, resuscitate their small portion
of the light, yellow buses progress, leave their lots.  

                     
Goodbye scarlet fever. Help for influenza.
Penicillin, inoculation: The end of women,
with their children, shut up behind placarded doors.


Consider the praise songs we might compose
to antibiotics, immunization, the identification
and near eradication of microscopic organisms
that have blinded, maddened, paralyzed, and killed. 


Yellow as zucchini flowers and, in their season,
as legion, school buses brake and collect,
brake and collect, at standard intervals
along the country’s subdividing roads. 


Late summer, the wind trending toward cool.
Early fall, the children heading back to school.
In the dream the doctors dreamed, no more
measles, mumps, rubella. Polio put aside.
Small pox persisting only in shelved vials.


Loaded up now, shocks dutifully enduring
the indignities pocked macadam delivers to a tire,
morning buses ferry our small gambles day by day.


In 1920, an American woman had less
than a 50% chance of seeing all her children 
reach the age of 10. Late spring, the wind
trending toward warm. Early summer, already burning.


Lemons, tomatoes, peaches, zucchini: some crops
are like this. Tended correctly, what fruits
they produce, if they produce any, will seem,
to most of us, like overwhelming plenty.