I believe this poem is addressed to her late friend, the poet Deborah Tall, as much as Warren's poems "Aftermath" and "A Kosmos".

Since we live in a free country, you are at liberty to remain completely ignorant of biology, medicine, and the failings of supersitious nature worship to heal cancer. But with that freedom comes a responsibility: you must abstain from propagating ignorance. You must personally refrain from saying ignorant things. Once you have undertaken a serious study of the subjects at hand -- once you have cultivated a knowledgeable and discerning understanding of the topic -- then, please, let no one stop you from joining the public discussion. But before then, don't. Don't tell your friends that eating healthier cures cancer, that chemo kills, that Airborne cures the sicks or that meditation shrinks tumors. For every time you do, you offend the public good in three ways:

1. By acting according to the principle that ignorant people are capable of formulating intelligent criticisms of complex topics, you make it more acceptable for ignorant people to add their noise to the din. You offend the public good by normalizing ignorant speech.

2. You run the risk of confusing others who are as ignorant on these matters. They might very well have been accepting the received wisdom that doctors know what they are talking about, but ignorantly. So when your ignorance comes along, with all your benign passion for natural purity, well it isn't hard is it for them to jump ship. You offend the public good by encouraging others to believe untrue things.

3. When you tell people who have lost loved ones to cancer that a more properly organic diet might have cured them, you are, essentially, shifting some of the blame to the patient's dietary decisions. You offend the public good by denigrating the common sense of the departed.

So please read a book. Read forty. Make sure they are hard ones, written by smart people. Train yourself to be less credulous. Then, when you have honed in yourself the critical ability to distinguish the rubbish of quackery from the science of medicine, then join us again in this ongoing conversation about the imperfections of healthcase and lifestyle, and how they can be remedied.

To be clear: until then, please shut UP.