Emerging Infectious Disease ISSN: 1080-6059

Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country

Another Dimension
Suggested Citation

Lola Haskins

Suggested citation for this article

That year there were many deaths in the village.

Germs flew like angels from one house to the next

and every family gave up its own. Mothers

died at their mending. Children fell at school.

Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.

Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one

died. And the angels whispered among themselves.

And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps,

your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck

when all the trees were still. And he would tell us

always, how he had felt that night, on the skin

of his own neck, the angels, passing.

Copyright 2004 by Lola Haskins. Reprinted from Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems, BOA Editions, 2004, by permission of the author and the publisher through American Life in Poetry, an initiative of Ted Kooser, the 2004-2006 poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress; the American Life in Poetry project is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Suggested citation for this article: Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet]. 2006, Aug [date cited]. http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1208.AD1208

DOI: 10.3201/eid1208.AD1208

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