Black Death came for her

False hope; mass graves; buried truths.

She’d been a doctor of the plague.

Eyeholes of glass; a beak packed with spices;

Symbolic really,

For nothing could mask the stench of death.

The boils on her flesh––

She felt that each hid the raw truth,

A fluid narrative between thin layers of skin.

They could have acted, but they hadn’t.

They could have done something, but they didn’t.

And men, women, and children snuffed out; dead stars in a dying universe.

But the true horror wasn’t in the pustules.

It was in the tragedy of not paying attention to history

There had been a gameplan for this, a simple set of instructions to follow

In the fading light of a modern world so capable of staunching the flow of blood

The last human survivor bemoaned medieval half-measures; stubbornness and pride.

And shedding literal tears of blood, she watched as the world fell on June 3rd, 2022