[dropcap]In[/dropcap] Catholic Brazil, rather than Ave Maria, a new lyric:
O Microcephaly, What are you doing to me,
Now you’ve come in to my family?

Boy looks at baby, protectively; guardedly.
Infant body shapes the arms enfolding it – the way they do.
And how do they do that – giving purpose to those long gone without?

In the elder brother’s nostrils – how handsome is the olive boy, how flawless,
Both the smell of newborn and the fumes of his own fear.

From a certain angle he could tell himself it’s just that the child’s cheeks are puffed out.
Swaddled in protective gear, the mutants are the fumigators, spraying the whole town!

But you have to crane your neck to get that; Really this is shrunken baby brain and cranium to match.

Kid Brother’s no Dizzy Gillespie; instead a casualty, likely of the Zika virus, which sounds like rum punch, a type of music or maybe the marque of a car, which it is – Tata Motors’ new hatchback launching in February, if you only change the ‘k’ to a ‘c’; thought to be key in the surge to 3893 cases of microcephaly reported in Brazil since October 2015.

Certainly a lifelong burden and maybe a kind of calling for this poor family.

Unwanted but not left unanswered.