Rieux Camus The Plague

He understood it all before it happened Because it happened before In much worse ways And he learned the lessons He traced the lessons His hero was there watching the denial at the beginning The refusal to connect the bleeding rats in the street With the human situation Understood the slow process of public learning and difficult recognition And with it the shifts in mood His hero told his own third- -person story Doing what he could do to save and help Lancing the buboes treating vainly the inflamed ganglia And himself going through stages of pain and empathy To overwhelmed distanced indifference And always unrelentingly doing his job And other themes too Of Exile and longing for home Of being cut off from the one one loves Of understanding a private happiness is not enough For an exile with a sense of duty and shame Of knowing no religious justification And witnessing how a single child's painful disintegration Can argue forever against Justice as heavenly compensation And in the end losing the one he loves Rewarded for his virtue only with an indifferent sky Knowing that the plague has died only for now And will when all are once again asleep in the dance of life- return.