Minor repair: carbide flame.
A single workman is enough.
A crack in the bridge rail, he says.
A sticking-plaster job,
he says, to throw us off the scent,
because illnesses are doing the rounds in the world’s wiring.
Phone lines and cables pass them on:
syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer, leukemia—
illnesses one wouldn’t have expected in metal.
They were diagnosed too late.
But how could we have prevented them?
Perhaps there is some purpose in it.
It might be that the whole of existence is being reordered.
They begin by taking from us
our diseases.
Everything else by and by.