After W. B. Yeats
In the dim coming times, vaccines won’t hold
against the waves of milky greenish foam
bourne by ill birds, cattle and swine,
and some will succumb to the mutating thing.
Flesh will rot and fall away, soulless
eyes burn hollow and gray, spoiled milk where once
fish swam. Gnawing hunger will raise these up,
shabby, disheveled and slow, this plague will advance.
Though we’ll prime our Bushmasters, hone our knives,
stock underground pantries with ammo and cans,
these vagrant hordes will smell our stunned silence,
their shrill hunger sound, and en masse stagger
upon us to feast on that which keeps us free.
Then Eastward, ravenous, we’ll all shamble on.
Marianne Taylor is a bookseller at Powell’s on Burnside where she manages the sales floor in the Blue, Gold, and Green rooms. In a previous life she taught literature and creative writing at a Midwestern college, and her poetry has been published widely in national journals and anthologies. She once served as Poet Laureate of her former small town, but for the past three years she’s been trying to find her way around Portland.