Vaccination chat
Washes Tokyo’s streets like
June’s opening rains
I wrote a little haiku, inspired by the constant chat I have been hearing lately about vaccines.
My acquaintances and students in their seventies are starting to get appointments. They worry about possible side-effects. “My friend couldn’t raise her arm for two days,” one of them told me. “My appointment is not until July. So I still have time to think about whether I will take it or not,” said another.
For what it is worth, I would definitely get vaccinated if I could get an appointment. I think of getting vaccinated as like putting on a seatbelt. It is uncomfortable, but it might save your life. In a tiny minority of cases, the seatbelt might even get stuck around your neck and do you harm. But the odds are very much better that it will protect you.
It is not just people of retirement age who talk about vaccinations these days. My younger students talk about helping out their parents and grandparents to book an appointment online. In an alternate universe, in which the coronavirus hadn’t jumped to humans, all the chat would be about something else – perhaps the rainy season, or planned holidays abroad.
It will be nice, once everyone has been offered a vaccination, to be able to talk about other things.
Vocabulary:
an alternate universe – a different reality from the one we are living in
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