Fever

A Poem

It was among us and before we could gather our wits,
it had done its deadly work and had disappeared.
Dr. Dinshaw Mehta, physician of M. K. Gandhi, 1 August 1919.

**

The thermometer fought the fever,
the mercury rising and falling, mostly rising.
The ceiling rehearsed migrations of white fish,
and the wallpaper quietly cultivated moss.
My name was lent to a chair beside the bed,
while sparrows audited the fever’s books;
Each minute wore a wet and tarnished halo,
and noon arrived disguised as midnight’s clerk.

In sleep, an eminent economist summoned me
and, with the practised kindness of a knife,
advised me to abandon economics;
the market, he implied, had priced me out.
Then all at once I found myself restoring
a relative’s goblin house, by toilet-light,
scrubbing a porcelain moon to dull perfection
before the walls remembered they were damp.
At last, a supermarket without water,
its bottles fluent only in their labels;
and there the Zionist professor, who had vowed
to have me disappear, compared the prices
as though revenge were merely another aisle.

Outside, the ordinary trees stayed faithful,
but every leaf translated into bells.
The pulse, that civil servant of the body,
misfiled the weather somewhere in the bones.
I woke to find the pillow holding rain,
its damp remembering countries I had missed;
Then morning, with its modest bureaucratic mercy,
stamped me ‘returned’, though not entirely home.

1 August 2026.

(Images from the Aburi Botanical Gardens, Ghana - with the picture above taken outside the old sanatorium, now a restaurant).