For Louis Pasteur

“Who is Apollo?” College student

How shall a generation know its story

If it will know no other? When, among

The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur

Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever,

Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard,

For all to see, the Streptococcus chain.

His mind was like Odysseus and Plato

Exploring a new cosmos in the old

As if he wrote a poem—his enemy

Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground

His introspection. “Science and peace,” he said,

“Will win out over ignorance and war,”

But then, the virus mutant in his vein,

“Death to the Prussian!” and “revenge, revenge!”

How shall my generation tell its story?

Their fathers jobless, boys for the CCC

And NYA, the future like a stairwell

To floors without a window or a door,

And then the army: bayonet drill and foxhole;

Bombing to rubble cities with textbook names

Later to bulldoze streets for; their green bodies

Drowned in the greener surfs of rumored France.

My childhood friend, George Humphreys, whom I still see

Still ten years old, his uncombed hair and grin

Moment by moment in the Hürtgen dark

Until the one step full in the sniper’s sight,

His pastor father emptied by the grief.

Clark Harrison, at nineteen a survivor,

Never to walk or have a child or be

A senator or governor. Herr Wegner,

Who led his little troop, their standards high

And sabers drawn, against a panzer corps,

Emerging from among the shades at Dachau

Stacked like firewood for someone else to burn;

And Gerd Radomski, listening to broadcasts

Of names, a yearlong babel of the missing,

To find his wife and children. Then they came home,

Near middle age at twenty-two, to find

A new reunion of the church and state,

Cynical Constantines who need no name,

Domestic tranquility beaten to a sword,

Sons wasted by another lie in Asia,

Or Strangeloves they had feared that August day;

And they like runners, stung, behind a flag,

Running within a circle, bereft of joy.

Hearing of the disaster at Sedan

And the retreat worse than the one from Moscow,

Their son among the missing or the dead,

Pasteur and his wife Mary hired a carriage

And, traveling to the east where he might try

His way to Paris, stopping to ask each youth

And comfort every orphan of the state’s

Irascibility, found him at last

And, unsurprised, embraced and took him in.

Two wars later, the Prussian, once again

The son of Mars, in Paris, Joseph Meister—

The first boy cured of rabies, now the keeper

Of Pasteur’s mausoleum—when commanded

To open it for them, though over seventy,

Lest he betray the master, took his life.

I like to think of Pasteur in Elysium

Beneath the sunny pine of ripe Provence

Tenderly raising black sheep, butterflies,

Silkworms, and a new culture, for delight,

Teaching his daughter to use a microscope

And musing through a wonder—sacred passion,

Practice and metaphysic all the same.

And, each year, honor three births: Valéry,

Humbling his pride by trying to write well,

Mozart, who lives still, keeping my attention

Repeatedly outside the reach of pride,

And him whose mark I witness as a trust.

Others he saves but could not save himself—

Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates—the spirit

Fastened by love upon the human cross.

Copyright Credit: Edgar Bowers, “For Louis Pasteur” from Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Edgar Bowers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Edgar Bowers.

Source: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

The Virus Mutant in His Veins