Shots
by Belle Waring
(published in her book, Dark Blonde, 1997, Sarabande Books)
Three nurses to hold him, this four-year-old who kicks me
crazy in the belly--six months pregnant but ha!
I've got the needle--the Measles-Mumps-Rubella.
Child, it stings like hell.
Listen to me, my little immunized enemy--
I'll take a bruise from you
before I'll see another kid like the one carried through the clinic doors
at the end of shift in his father's arms, seizing
seizing
The father's shirt is
black with sweat
is parying in Mexican
grand mal, I try to get a line in, Mother of God, intractable
Get him over to St. Luke's
but in the ambulance, he codes, and then, in the ER
with the furious swirl of personnel, crash cart rumbling in, curtains
snatched to shield him from the drive-bys and the drunks,
the boy expired.
Measles encephalitis.
He never got his shots.
So walk out, dark blonde, into the sun that will scald you red
and bleach your hair to tungsten burning, drive the dusty valley
smacked with
irrigated fields. Bad counterfeit. Too green.
His young bones green, unripe, gronjo
from the old Teutonic root--
Green. Untrained. Green. Freshly killed.
His young bones green and full of marrow.
Green at work there in the rows, hands stretched out to pick a
beefsteak tomato at the end of season when they strip the plants clean
whether the fruit is ripe or not.
This poem is in a book that was published in 1997, but it feels particularly relevant now. Should we start sending copies of it to RFK, Jr.?
Belle Waring is a registered nurse, as well as a creative writing instructor and an award-winning poet. I think the details in this poem benefit from the poet's experience as a nurse; the voice of the speaker here comes across as knowledgeable and trustworthy.
The speaker goes back and forth between directing her words to the reader and addressing the four-year-old boy to whom she is giving a shot. I love how conversational this poem is, and how it also goes back and forth between run-on sentences and sentence fragments. I am also a fan of the line breaks, which are strange and unrule, and would drive most poets I know to madness!
The poem begins in a hospital and ends in fields where, I assume, Mexican laborers are picking the tomatoes. The word "green" appears six times, and in this poem, has many associations. Green, like fake money, of farms falsely made. Green as in young. The green of unripe fruit. Green as a metaphor for illness.
What does all this have to do with this little boy getting his vaccine shot? The boy who did not get his and who then died a very preventable death was, we can assume, the child of laborers. The child was not given his vaccines, presumably due to poverty; the imbalance of capitalism cause many deaths, particularly indirectly, as in this case. The boy getting his vaccine, blonde and presumably not a child of laborers, is a child of some privilege--he is getting vaccinated against preventable diseases that kill many children around the world.
Yes, I am making a lot of assumptions in my reading here, but they are all based on what Waring has provided in her text. This is an amazing poem, and I imagine the poet is as dismayed as I am that we are having to convince people to vaccinate their children.
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