Jubilee

An ancient stone hospital was winding down.
The wards were full of the dead.
Soon the last breath would expire
with a barely audible sigh,
like a candle flame softly extinguished
by a breeze through the curtains.

The only survivors were myself
and a strangely androgynous nurse.
She was surely a woman,
but her face looked like my son and my father
when I glanced at her sideways.

We strolled from bed to bed,
surveying the deceased.
Some of the patients
had been there for centuries.

We saw an old man with an archaic nightcap
from the time of the plagues,
children with limbs missing and mangled
in factory explosions,
elegant young men with wasting, coughing diseases,
sad, pale, addicted women, overdosed and drowned.

We saw creatures that had been sick and dying
for so long, they had lost part of their humanity,
and lay motionless in truncated lumps
under neglected bed sheets.

We saw patients with their hearts eaten away
and their throats plugged up.
We saw emaciated bodies with hair and nails
grown into wild tangled brambles
to rival Sleeping Beauty's castle.

Soon the nurse and I would also die.
What to do?

"I have a potion," she said.
"It brings the dead back to life
just as Jesus raised Lazarus
from the tomb."

Being a Jew, I was skeptical.

But as we pressed liquid to lips,
eyelids began to flutter.
Wasted centenarians leapt from their beds.
People without legs turned cartwheels.

We raced from sickroom to sickroom,
giddy with our godlike task,
the hospital filling with human voices
after years of silence.
Crutches were smashed against walls.
Iron lungs were abandoned.

The potion ran dry,
and with more corpses to revive,
the nurse whisked me to the kitchen,
handed me a mortar and pestle
and a jar full of something
and said, "Here--grind!"

We whipped up a frothy, buttery batch
of death-be-gone
and resumed our rounds,
flinging gobs of it into shriveled, blackened mouths,
like paperboys tossing the morning edition
onto the porch.

The newly resurrected danced and sang
in croaking voices and garbled dialects.
They laughed and shrieked and sobbed
and stared at their functioning bodies
in wonder and amazement.

We came to a room with two humanoid creatures
strapped to a bed.
They were like hunch-backed men
with the heads of alligators.
According to their charts,
they had committed crimes--
eaten people, like the Big Bad Wolf.

"What about these two?" I asked,
hesitant to reward such evil.

"Give them back their lives,"
replied the nurse in a firm, clear voice.
"All are to be redeemed!"

David Aronson
March 2007