Gerry Jacobson

Vaccinology

It was winter, it was summer. A blurred memory of fever and coughing and cold. A whooping cough epidemic in London when I was a child. A blurred feeling that we were cared for, looked after, given medicine. But how did we keep warm in a winter of chilblains and slushy snow and post-war austerity? And then followed the hot summer of the polio epidemic. Hearing the stories of kids that woke up paralysed. “Don’t go to swimming pools!” we were told. And measles, chickenpox, mumps, rubella, scarlet fever; these diseases seemed to circulate all the time. I think I had all of them at some time in childhood and became profoundly healthy in adult life.

my body moves
to café music
the waiter
tells me to sit down
and wait for a vaccine

---

About the Author

Gerry Jacobson lives in Canberra, Australia, and can be found writing tanka in its cafés.  He was a geologist in a past life and now celebrates reincarnation as a dancer.