Rieux Camus The Plague Poem by Shalom Freedman

He understood it all before it happened
Because it happened before
In much worse ways
And he learned the lessons
He traced the lessons
His hero was there watching the denial at the beginning
The refusal to connect the bleeding rats in the street
With the human situation
Understood the slow process of public learning and difficult recognition
And with it the shifts in mood
His hero told his own third- -person story
Doing what he could do to save and help
Lancing the buboes treating vainly the inflamed ganglia
And himself going through stages of pain and empathy
To overwhelmed distanced indifference
And always unrelentingly doing his job
And other themes too
Of Exile and longing for home
Of being cut off from the one one loves
Of understanding a private happiness is not enough
For an exile with a sense of duty and shame
Of knowing no religious justification
And witnessing how a single child's painful disintegration
Can argue forever against Justice as heavenly compensation
And in the end losing the one he loves
Rewarded for his virtue only with an indifferent sky
Knowing that the plague has died only for now
And will when all are once again asleep in the dance of life- return.