after Käthe Kollwitz’s ‘Mothers holding their sick children waiting to consult a physician’ (1920), lithograph



I.
No one knows exactly how paracetamol works:

its mechanism for reducing the body’s temperature

a black box according to a lengthy article on the subject.
I read this article on my phone while my daughter

fights fever in her sleep. The blue light in my palm

forms a raft in the darkness. She is as warm
as a stovetop. Heat radiates in small waves so that

I feel it through the air: without touch. I say stovetop

but I mean pulsar. My neutron star with the sticky brow
sweeps and rotates, turns to and then away from me.

On the bedside table, a bottle of children’s Panadol

stands guard. The plastic, stained brown like glass,
feels weightier than it should. Clear syrup,

its strawberry tang unmysterious to the tongue,

swallowed by nightlight’s glow. She sleeps deeply,
cooled briefly by a commonplace elixir

only partially understood after seventy years of use.
II.
The women in the lithograph hold their children

to their bodies. We do not know what ails their offspring,

only that the date indicates global years of pain:
an influenza pandemic has churned out more loss

than can be absorbed. Their exhaustion

so palpable, I feel its dull weight in the space
between image and eye. The women, huddled in

the waiting room, speak only to their shadows.

We do not know if the shadows speak back.
And perhaps we won’t ever understand what eases pain:

even the healing properties of time are unstudied,

intuited by those whose wounds are no longer tender
to touch. Eventually the darkness drains from the sky

like fluid. By morning, the night is mostly forgotten.

What else is left but a cool, bright mark. I know
the worst is over when she rises and lunges for me:

leonine, hungry for water. I think: if only sickness

could be thwarted by the fierce worry of mothers, 
wrung out and tossed aside by their skilful, death-

knowing hands, then we might never be ill again.