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.
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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.
