Journey to Rome, 1820

   by Joseph Gascho

He overhears a surgeon on the ship

that final night, wild mistral wind howling

down from the north, whispering about

consumption and the truth that causes it,

the fulsome hemorrhagic lungs he’s seen

at demonstrations of pathology, 

how he has marveled at the beauty

of the specimens. “No words suffice,” he says.

Coughing red into his handkerchief,

Keats stumbles to his nether berth, and

there, beneath the darkling stars, pours out

a poem, entitles it “Ode on Disease”.

With water crashing hard against the hull, 

he writes his name, stares into the sea.

  Hippocrates Anthology, 2020. (Commended poem)