Specific

Was once a derogatory

Term for a kind of quackery,

Someone’s claim to have found a cure,

A singular cure, specific,

For all cases of some disease,

When everyone knew diseases

Had multiple causes and thus

Must be cured in multiple ways.

Turns out, some specific cures work,

Although to find one remains rare.

Correlations as tight as that

Tie few threads in life’s tapestries.

Could there be a specific cure

For cruelty? For misery?

A number of faiths offer these

To millions of adherents,

But no one really believes them,

Especially not the faithful,

Who behave as if cruelty

Must be both inevitable

And, in some instances, needful,

Even for sweet divinity.

But what if it were as simple

As Vitamin C for scurvy?

Wouldn’t that make the future weird,

A world in which no one was cruel

And no one was miserable,

Humans flying from birth to death

Like free bloody birds—as Larkin,

Miserable Larkin, might have hissed?

Sitting beside a barbed-wire fence,

Watching a herd of cattle graze,

It seems beyond imagining,

A future without cruelty,

And in its specifics it is.

Yet somehow you can posit this.