Every time I walked up to the old house
where we stayed—in this place
where people were banished, sick
and dying—I went between the posts

that had once supported a latched
gate that kept out the undesirables.
This house, where the doctors of
the settlement had lived, must have
been especially vulnerable.
The physician had to be kept safe,
free from potential contagion—

unlike the Belgian priest who
begged to be sent to Kalaupapa
in its early days to tend to
the dying—the only one of many
to contract the disease and die
of it there, too.

People speculated it was because
he shared his pipe with the lepers,
his flock of beloveds. They didn’t
know then that the disease
affected only those with a
specific genetic makeup.

But Damien, the man who
willingly came to serve in love,
for years referred to the people
there as we lepers, always
one of them, before the telltale
signs appeared on his skin,
before others came and built
gates to separate the sick
from the well.

And I and others—
in this holy, beautiful place
of so much suffering, so much
heartbreak amid acts of
neighborliness and kindness—

we were there to serve in
this new century, free to walk
anywhere, to kneel on the soft grass
by their headstones, to tidy
and clip, blessedly unhampered,
whisper to no one and
everyone—

rest in peace.

•••

The former leper colony, as it was called then, on the island of Moloka’i, Hawaii, where thousands of people with leprosy, now called Hanson’s Disease, were sent to live and die in isolation beginning in 1865. Father Damien, a Belgian priest, arrived in 1873 at his request to serve the people there till his death in 1889.