What It Wasn’t

Suzanne Morris

September 7, 2021

It wasn’t Covid,

said the bereft woman

requesting prayers

for the soul of a

young man

recently deceased.

So don’t think it was his fault,

I heard in her

note of caution.

And I thought back to when

no one seemed to know of

anyone nearby who had

developed Covid,

much less, had died of it

so if you heard someone

had died that way,

you would say, horrified,

It was Covid!

But that was before

there was a vaccine.

That was before Delta,

before what wasn’t

anyone’s fault

became what was.

That was before the

vaccinated bore the

unvaccinated

like a cross.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, Aftermath (SFA University Press, 2016). Until recently, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. However, last year she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic, (Kallisto Gaia Press).