To make sure I’m getting my “official” propaganda every night, I try to tune in to PBS Newshour. The other night they had a segment about a new book of poetry called “Dear Vaccine”.
And suddenly I had so many questions. Like how weird do you have to be to write an ode to a pharmaceutical product? Couldn’t they have just called it “Dear Pfizer”? What do these people think now that the vaccine doesn’t work against the current variant?
I wandered over the website to see if I could get any insight. The featured poem is from “young people’s poet laureate” Naomi Shihab Nye. The first line is “Save us, dear vaccine”. “Save us”? Isn’t that what people say when they’re praying to God? She goes on to give the vaccine magical properties. “Vaccine, please make the air clean!” Even Pfizer never said it was going to do that. Next I expect her to say the vaccine will end global warming.
I get it. People had high hopes for the vaccine. It even kind of worked at the beginning. But at this point an entire collection of poems saying prayers to products that we know have killed or injured hundreds of thousands seems a little gauche, to say the least.
I hadn’t written any poetry for over 20 years but knowing about this book inspired me to write something from a different perspective of the pandemic. I don’t want to cede an entire art form to a bunch of hypochondriacs. So I’ll publish that next.