when a child is ill

In a crisis, the word community,
gets scrubbed clean. It’s not that
it’s been hiding amongst gutter-lain leaves
and cans,
or minuted in the local rag,
Rather, it’s left to molder in the van of life's
fast-passing train, a kind of sweet yester-notion,
or rarely heard refrain, still resonating beyond
the clatter.

Yet scrubbed it is, like a sea-found Piece-of Eight,
or a faintly historic, though now outmoded, memorial plate.
So when it’s a child, those
late perspectives, the day-born absolutes,
fritter and recede,
leaving us with a newly blank date, a shovelful of nothings,
as if pure silence, or incoherence
can compensate.