Your Worry Will Have No End
When your eighteen-month-old child seizes,
you are alarmed. His pediatrician
sends him, by ambulance,
to a children’s hospital
downtown. You ride along.
The sirens of ambulances
and police
cars are not beyond
the parameters
of your experience.
Someone orders
a spinal tap.
You know what this means.
You have read in the local newspaper
a story about the sad parents
of a dead child. Meningitis.
They thought it the flu.
Once discovered it was too late.
You also know the danger
of needles
near the spinal column.
Your mother instilled
this fear in you
long before your brother
suffered a severed
spinal cord.
No epidural!
you insisted. Until
the pain
was too great.
Induced labor
equals labor
time five.
Eventually you will read
that our common
fear of needles
is due to the danger
of thorns
for our distant
ancestors.
If only your brother
had experienced
this fear.
The brother of Henry
David Thoreau
died from in-
fection
caused by shaving.
Razor blades–
like thorns–
are more
dealdly than we know.