Monday I sat
in the largest all-brick building men and women have ever built
listening to story tellers.
For many hours stories told and retold
Of tragic pain and
dramatic sorrow and
humble heroism told through filters
that gradually removed layers of life's drama,
distilling from life's crude emotional mixture
strange and exotic creatures
unlike any we had ever seen before.
Each telling rendered these creatures more distinct and terrible
born from human life and distilled out of it
the story tellers called this species of creature disease
and drove them out of lives with their stories
like hunters
chasing rabits out of a thicket
the creatures they hunted were among the strangest and most obscure
of their species
so baffling that other tellers had long given up,
and left these creatures constricted tightly around suffering lives
but sitting around a large oak table
in a small room of the largest all-brick building in the world
these story-tellers told and told and retold
distilled and separated these creatures
held them up for us to gaze curiously at
focused our views of their strange figures and their alien names
and in the final telling of the day
cut each open
to be dissected still further
cures? these doctors found none. but possibilities, possibilities yes.
just tell the story again.