Regurgitation does not flow in a poem
Nor stenosis, aneurysm, dissection, transcatheter
Not even acronyms, TAVI, TEVAR
What is a bard to do
Maybe digress, with fluidity
The liquor of life
Corpuscular- laden claret
Fermented in bony hollows
Distilled in bodily chambers
Carefully nourished in lungs
Filtered, cleansed in delicate organs
Perfected by evolution
As in a Munchen brewery
Or a wine farm on the Cape
But this elixir
Cannot nourish
The brain or the toe
Unless it is forced to go
To those distant thirsty clients
No dray-horse or wagon
No coopered oak barrels
Or deep-drawn steel vats
With shiny copper pipes
Edison, Faraday and Franklin
Did not figure this out
But Aristotle, Galen, Galvani and Harvey
Had the inkling
That a muscular core
Signaled by corporeal currents
Powered by cellular movement
Persuading the sanguineous fluid
To channel this way and that
Through elastic vessels
Picking up essential supplies
Discarding waste as it goes
To keep all fragile parts
Alive for three score years and ten
Now if this complexity was so simple
You people would not be here tonight
Nothing to do in the Zilla mansion
No problems, no skills required
But a murmour here
A leak there
An aberrant gene
Pressure rising
Beating out of turn
The heart and its tributaries
Can cease, or overflow
And you have to sew them together again
Sew to your heart’s delight
Cape Town, South Africa, February 2017
