A year ago if somebody had said AstraZeneca
I would have thought
South African tennis player, German sports car
the hot AK47 toting freedom fighter
that was my imaginary, Nazi slaughtering, girlfriend
in a war I was never in
Even the smugly lensed boffins in Oxford
dipping their Hobnobs, hypothesising
over the powerfully entitled thrust of
Boris Johnson, their sly Megan phantasies
would have calculated a blank.
I was lucky to get it
walked into the no name pharmacy
between anonymous suburbs
on an early spring day
for a grumpy old white man like me, to
stab me with a needle
then mass stab a line of other old white dudes
perhaps thinking, I hope, like me,
we had given another chance, this entitlement
will give us time to understand, what it is to live.
Alan Hill is the former Poet Laureate of the small City of New Westminster in western Canada. He came to Canada in 2005 after meeting his Vietnamese- Canadian wife to be whilst they were both working in Botswana.
