ysabetwordsmith | Poem: "The Alpha Blight"

This poem came from the October 7, 2014 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from

corvi. It also fills the "vandals" square in my 9-11-14 card for the Halloween Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by

janetmiles.

"The Alpha Blight"

It was not a bomb that proved humanity's downfall,
but a bit of biological warfare gone astray.

The thing was supposed to burrow into enemy brains
and replace whatever barbaric language they spoke
with English the way God intended.

That wasn't what it did.

It burrowed into everyone's brain and
ate every language they could speak or write
and replaced it all with nothing.

The official name was Wernicke's phage,
but everyone called it the alpha blight
because of the way it attacked first literacy
and then the rest of language.

The ones who made it and spread it
were vandals the likes of which
humanity had never seen before,
destroyers not just of civilization
but of sapience itself --

for without language, humans
were no more than dumb apes.

It began amongst the enemies, of course,
but it did not stay there for long, swiftly
spreading to the soldiers arrayed against them.

Soon the soldiers could not follow orders,
could not give orders, could not even
remember what orders were.

They shot the enemy, and each other,
and sometimes themselves with guns
they suddenly did not know how to use,
turning the strange sticks over and over
in their agile, ignorant paws.

It did not matter that there were instructions
when no one was able to read them anymore.

The alphabets of Earth were eaten away
in less than a year, languages sucked dry,
empty husks of literature abandoned to rot.

Nothing remained but a few shambling survivors
eking out a miserable existence amidst the ruins.

The history of this was written
neither by the winners nor the losers.

It was legible only in the erratic marks
left by victims as they tried desperately
to record what was happening to them,
their letters fragmented by the phage
even as they formed, like a manuscript
inexorably devoured by mold.

* * *

Notes:

The idea of an alphabet blight was first raised in the short story "Report" by Donald Barthelme, part of the original prompt.

Linguistic imperialism and the English-only movement have caused many problems.

A phage could be useful in biological warfare. A phage can make ordinary bacteria devastating.

Wernicke's Area is associated with aphasia or speech loss. Language may be necessary for sapience.

Mold on manuscripts is a challenge in preserving old manuscripts.

John Palmer has written a followup story inspired by this.