"The fire of poetry ignites and sparks by rubbing two silences together."

The poems in Ode to the Vaccinated Dead and Other Poems and Plays were inspired by two silences: the silences of our institutions and the silencing of physicians and also the silencing of those who were sceptical of the vaccine. Richard Olafson was immediately sceptical when he witnessed the largest wealth transfer in history occur on the same day the pandemic was announced. When the pandemic was declared it did not take Richard Olafson long to realize that the introduction of the gain-of-function bioweapon was a facilitator of a vast, global money-laundering scheme. He wrote the poem “Blockchain Dawn” when the poet saw that the long-planned New World Order was being imposed globally. As a poet he responded through poetry, with deep metaphor providing a bellweather for truth. Like many of the unvaccinated he witnessed a mass psychosis enwrap the global citizens and in parallel he saw many people who had taken the vaccine harmed by it. He began “counting the dead” as the large number of injuries and deaths from the vaccine began rolling across the screen. The aim of the Covid19 period was not about health at all but appeared to have another, darker agenda. The coercion and protocols from a science standpoint had no logical, informed health decisions, but were designed to usher in totalitarian one world government run by a handful of technocratic managers and indoctrinate the next generation into a completely surveilled, controlled system. At the root of the Great Reset and the plan to transform culture radically is a eugenic formula for depopulation. This is both a crime against humanity and an assault on the human spirit, and the one weapon we have to fight against this is our humanity, the spiritual spark that is in all of us. The fire of poetry is an enduring flame, it overrides our consciousness, it can push back the dark. With the imagination we will all flourish.

Richard Olafson is an editor, poet, book designer and publisher. A long-time Victoria resident, he is active in many community organizations. Richard Olafson has published a number of books and chapbooks, among them Blood of the Moon, Cloud on My Tongue, and There Are Some Men So Unlucky They Do Not Even Have Bodies. He attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in its second year of operation and was much influenced the following year by taking classes from Warren Tallman at UBC’s English Department. He has published, in his career as a publisher, over 850 books. He lives in Victoria with his family. His wife is renowned jazz singer Carol Sokoloff.