Deep in our own pandemic, references to a similar event, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, will jump out at one, won’t they?
Grace Marie Grafton devotes a poem to the California painter, Rex Slinkard (died 1918, age 31), “Death at an Early Age”:
“he died …
of what was called the Spanish Flu.
… as his fever rose and
held him in fire, he asked to be carried
down to water. They say that he sang
next to the waves as he died.”
There’s a transgender aspect to the poem that also gives it a contemporary connection:
“He imagined himself a woman …
… break[ing]
into shattered forms that walk together
near the surf …”
*
Lucille Lang Day, in her poem “Journeys,” briefly looks in on journeys of some in her family tree. Her grandmother on her mother’s side, for instance:
“… my mother’s
mother dies again of pneumonia
in Massachusetts in the flu epidemic
of 1918, and my mother comes over
mountains, rivers and plains
to California …”
The “again” in the line above refers to the grandmother dying in Day’s imagination — once from the physical life, then again when her grandchild revisits her memory.
*
sources:
Lens: poetry of art in California
by Grace Marie Grafton
2019. Unsolicited Press, Portland OR
Becoming an Ancestor
by Lucille Lang Day
2015. Cervena Barva Press, West Somerville MA
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