Left: Front Cover: If God Is A Virus: Poems by Seema Yasmin
Photo Credit: Haymarket Books
Right: Photo of Seema Yasmin by Lucas Passmore published on her Official Website

My Poetry Corner April 2026 features the poem “Disease Is Not the Only Thing That Spreads” from the first poetry collection If God Is a Virus (Haymarket Books, 2021) by Seema Yasmin, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, and author. Inspiration for this book came from her reporting as a doctor and journalist on the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and its aftermath. The poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, role of the aid industrial complex during health crises, and the way medical myths and rumors can travel faster than microbes. By chance, the book was released during the coronavirus global pandemic.

Yasmin writes in the seven-verse poem “We Are Watching” (p. 40):

Brown deaths six (thousand) / Miles away matter less // Or not at all if that segment / Airs before commercial break // We regret to inform you // Your scheduled programming / Has been interrupted

Born in Warwickshire, England, Yasmin was raised in East London by immigrant Muslim parents of Indian and Burmese ancestry. She studied biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London where she graduated in 2005 and earned her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree at the University of Cambridge. Permission to study medicine did not come easy for a girlchild born into a conservative religious Muslim family. She shares her frustration and anger in the poem “lady doctor” (stanzas 2 & 3, pp. 12-13):

I was vexed slammed the kitchen door twelve-year-old girl with a penchant for electrons and using the ice cube tray to freeze different molarities of saline to find the lowest freezing point not to mince garlic green chilies into frozen cubes for speedy curry making to feed hungry doctor husband one day

lady doctor you say to the receptionist and then how can there be none? it is a women’s health clinic how can there be none? none? in all the NHS there is none? and the tug in your uterus is so deep you say a man cannot go that deep cannot go so deep as a woman you say as I cringe behind you and the woman whose mother let her be a receptionist shrugs

Yasmin started her medical career in the UK National Health Service (NHS), where she worked for a year at the Homerton University Hospital. In the final poem of the collection, “NHS Zindabaad!”—Farsi/Urdu/Hindu word meaning “long live”—she warns of the importance of national health care (stanzas 6-7-8, pp. 69-70):

Abscesses need draining, bedpans need changing // —and the prime minister will never say, NHS / Zindabaad. In these dark cold days he keeps / trying to starve it, keeps trying to starve us / under budget cuts, my cala’s blood sweetens // arteries tense with austerity and rage. I soothe her / with this story: in Amreeka the insulin would cost / your left leg and kalima finger. Swallow the bitter / pill, aunty, and plead with Allah: NHS Zindabaad! // Child of a nurse, lover of men, heed this poet’s / warning, when it dies we die. / Let it live. / Let it live. / Let us live.
[Amreeka is a 2009 movie that portrays the experiences of a Palestinian family navigating life in rural Illinois, after moving to the USA from the West Bank.]

Yasmin moved to the United States in 2010. The following year, she joined the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service. While investigating disease outbreaks in prisons, hospitals, reservations, and other settings, she realized the importance of journalism as an effective means of science communication for shifting public health policy.

In “Outbreak Bingo,” set up in the form of a bingo card with nine squares, the poet fills each square, except the one in the middle, with an observation (p. 39):

Peace-keeping troops start a cholera outbreak – Blame locals for eating “bushmeat” – Say nothing of deforestation

Say nothing of climate change – Blank square – White doctors receive danger pay

Go on safari – Buy soapstone ornaments with per diem – White doctor drips polio vaccine into a Black baby’s mouth, smiles for a photo

In 2013, Yasmin received a Dalla Lana Fellowship in Journalism & Health Impact at the University of Toronto. Upon completing her fellowship, she joined The Dallas Morning News in Texas/USA, as a reporter covering the Ebola (2014-2016) and Zika (2015-2016) epidemics, as well as public health crises of racism, gun violence, and gender violence.

The poem “All the News That’s Fit to Print” addresses whose stories get told in the media (stanzas 2 & 3, p. 5):

Editorial judgment dictates at least sixteen / Black people must die to equal one White / man’s death. Forty-three if the outbreak // is old news, does not involve profuse / hemorrhage, a former colony, or biblical / references. Subtract one dozen if our boys // are deployed to clean up their mess…

After covering the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, West Africa, during the final stages of the epidemic, Yasmin experienced the limitations of objectivity used in journalism for telling the stories of Ebola survivors. Undaunted by the challenge, she embarked on linking the worlds of journalism, medicine, international aid, and their intersections into the poetic form. Four of the poems, all titled “If God Is a Virus,” give voice to the virus. They reveal how humans have evolved together with viruses over millennia, even altering our DNA. The following excerpts are from these poems:

God wants to know / why you didn’t get a flu / shot…. God thinks / anti-vaxxers have a death wish (p. 3).

She is a Muslim woman in charge of the remote control / & human evolution. Eight percent of your genome / is viral—we are literal cousins of ancient pathogens / wretched offspring of pandemics (p. 16).

A virus gave you a gene called SYN so you could grow placentas. / SYN fuses baby to mother fuses uterus to placenta (p. 55).

God is chanting about wombs, babies / & evolution, but it is not what you think. / Don’t make assumptions about God. / God is not pro-life (p. 63).

“My God Is a Virus” concludes (p. 67): God is HPV and the anti-vaxxers / are the anti-Christ.
[The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is sexually transmitted.]

Yasmin joined Stanford University, California, as a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism in 2017, investigating the spread of misinformation and pseudoscience during epidemics. In 2019, she was appointed as Director of the Stanford University of Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University.

Considering her focus, it’s not by chance that the opening poem of the collection is “Disease Is Not the Only Thing That Spreads” (p. 2). This 20-verse poem describes other fast-moving forms of disinformation and misinformation that threaten our well-being and kill relationships.

What else is contagious: Ellen’s long tongue.
A rumor we buried daddy in an unmarked
grave. History. Pathogens criss-crossing agar
-plated petri dishes like rebel soldiers breaching
trenches. This story: that we had it coming,
that we are good only for uncivil wars and dis
-eases. That we prayed for colonization. Blood.

[…]

…What else
is contagious: doctored death certificates. Half
-truths. Cursive. Ink. They say there is no cure
then there is a cure only for them. So. What
else spreads: knots of grief twisting bowels
into distended loops of fermenting torment. No
days of mourning. Two years of outside
intervention. Armies. Conviction….

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin used social media, podcasts, and popular science articles to better inform the public about the coronavirus disease. In 2021, concerned about the spread of myths, hoaxes, rumors, and outright lies about vaccines, she published the book Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them.

To read the complete featured poem “Disease Is Not the Only Thing That Spreads” and learn more about the work of British American medical doctor and author Seema Yasmin, go to my Poetry Corner April 2026.