Mary Ellen Talley
Triolet for Ryan White
We look back and say it was an age of cruel.
Which comes first and lasts longer, fear or ignorance?
His life-saving transfusion cast him in a public cesspool.
We look back and say it was an age of cruel.
With his 1984 diagnosis came harassment and death sentence.
Allowed back in school, he soared five years like a teen Icarus.
We look back and say it was an age of cruel.
Which comes first and lasts longer, fear or ignorance?
Editor’s Note: Ryan White died 28 years ago today. White, a teenager in Kokomo, Indiana, was one of the first children with hemophilia to be diagnosed with AIDS. While medical professionals knew he posed no risk to other students, parents and teachers in Howard County protested his attendance at school. White was allowed to return to school only after a drawn out administrative appeal process. By that time, he had become a popular celebrity and a powerful advocate for AIDS research and public education. He died on April 8, 1990, one month before his high school graduation.
Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have recently appeared in Raven Chronicles, U City Review, and Ekphrastic Review as well as in the anthologies All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood (Sage Hill Press, 2016), edited by Elise Gregory, Emily Gwinn, Kaleen McCandless, Kate Maude, and Laura Walker; Ice Cream Poems: Reflections on Life With Ice Cream (World Enough Writers, 2017), edited by Patricia Fargnoli; and Poems in the Aftermath: An Anthology From the 2016 Presidential Transition Period (Indolent Books, 2018), edited by Michael Broder.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem is a triolet—usually an 8-line form, although the number of lines may vary. You can read more about the triolet form here and here. The power of the triolet lies in its repetition of lines and end-words. Another example of a triolet from the HIV Here & Now project is “Triolet for Uncle Dennis” by D. Gilson. Try writing a triolet related to HIV/AIDS—perhaps about a prominent person, like Ryan White, or someone known only to family and friends, like D. Gilson’s Uncle Dennis. You can also write a poem that is not about a specific person, or about a person at all—it can be about anything related to HIV/AIDS, such as the virus, the immune system, treatments, prevention, testing, risk, fear, etc.