Inoculation
Susan Donnelly

Cotton Mather studied smallpox for a while,
instead of sin. Boston was rife with it.
Nor being ill himself, thank Providence,
but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,
if he'd ever had the pox. To which Onesimus replied,
"Yes and no." Not insubordinate
or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps
musing, as one saying to another:

"Consider how a man
can take inside all manner of disease
and still survive."

Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:

My mother bore me in the southern wild.
She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived
to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.