Patience

Wait.

The rain is isolating enough,

I need not do it myself.

Will the water rise?

Burst the main?

Feculence in the supply?

Typhus and cholera are

diseases long absent

from the Bankfield Surgery.

Wash

your hands, keep them to yourself,

keep away from old parents.

Will I get it too?

Feel the plague,

pestilence in the bloodflow.

Sneezes and coughing are

conditions once dismissed

by the young person I was.

Think.

Are you vulnerable yet?

Fifty is the new thirty.

We don’t need face-masks,

that don’t fit,

contagious at the jaw-line.

Buying and storing are

behaviours once despised

in crises of the past.
 

Wait.

You will be doing something,

if you do not panic.