Marjorie Moorhead
Counting
My first real love
—not the puppy love of High School—
became my first real death
—different from my Grandmother’s passing—
and I had to really mourn and release,
before my own rebirth
—second (spiritual), after first (literal)—was possible.
Five years to say “good bye”
and then turn to my own
mortality.
Five years more before the seeds
of virus blossomed, “full blown.”
Ten years from onset of virus till
invention of (still imperfect) drugs
to treat it.
One good friend, gone
before he could benefit
from better drugs that came too late.
Three that formed “the cocktail” combo.
Countless, the ways this virus
steered my path.
Unquantifiable,
the sadness for those
who left too early.
Marjorie Moorhead‘s poem “Starlight in My Pocket” appeared in the HIV Here & Now project annual run-up to World AIDS Day in 2017. Her poem “Wandering the Anthropocene” is included in the anthology A Change of Climate (Independently published, 2017) edited by Sam Illingworth and Dan Simpson to benefit the Environmental Justice Foundation. Her poems will appear in the anthologies Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont, Vol. 2 (Blueline Press, 2018) and in the Opening Windows Fourth Friday Poets collection forthcoming from Hobblebush Press in 2018. Marjorie lives in New Hampshire near the Vermont border.
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Here is today’s prompt
(optional as always)
Today’s poem used the prompt about numbers from April 11. That reminds us of another fun way to organize a poem—letters of the alphabet. An abecedarian is a poem that uses the alphabet as its organizing principle. The most basic kind of abecedarian begins each line with a successive letter of the alphabet, like this poem by Randall Mann. But the alphabet can be used in other ways to structure a poem, as in this poem by Julia Alvarez. Write an abecedarian about HIV. Some possibilities include a day in the life of a person with HIV; names of HIV drugs; names of HIV-related opportunistic infections; names of famous people who are living with HIV or who died of AIDS.