The poem opens like a news bulletin and ends like a private panic. It starts with a statistic: brain scans taken before and after COVID show a loss of "between / 0.2% and 2.0% of brain matter." From there it makes a darkly comic leap. If everyone's brain shrank even slightly, then "everyone is slightly dumber." The question is what you would say to a whole society in that state. The speaker's answer is simple and old: be patient, be forgiving. Then he turns the argument back on himself and on us. If our judgment is the thing that may be damaged, how could any of us tell?
The construction is plain, close to speech. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short and lowercase, with capitals kept only for "COVID" and "I". That makes the voice sound like someone thinking aloud rather than performing. The first stanza imitates the dryness of a report. The line break after "between" holds the reader up just before the numbers arrive, and the decimals make the loss sound tiny and clinical. Then comes "here's a scary thought," a casual phrase that drops the lab coat. The ellipsis in "even just slightly..." works like a pause before a punchline, and the punchline is a flat, childish word, "dumber." The poem is funny, but the humor sets up the serious part.
The sharpest stretch is the list: "be careful what you argue over / fight over / hate over / hurt over / kill over." Repeating "over" at the end of each line stands in for rhyme, and the stacked lines climb from an ordinary quarrel to murder. The reader is walked up a staircase of escalation, and the poem suggests the first step and the last belong to the same staircase. Just before it, the speaker asks what advice there is to give "a populace under such circumstances." The stiff, official words "populace" and "circumstances" make the question sound like a government statement. The plain commands that follow then feel more human by contrast.
The advice stands alone in its own short stanza: "be patient with one another." The next line, "be more forgiving," carries a parenthesis: "(the sagest wisdom no matter what era)." The aside admits that the poem has no new wisdom to offer. The brain-scan premise is only a fresh excuse for an old lesson. That fits the title, "As Good a Reason as Any for Compassion," which suggests compassion never really needed a special reason. This one just happens to be topical.
The last stanza is the poem's real turn. "maybe I'm not thinking too clearly right now / maybe you're not thinking too clearly yourself" is built in mirror-image halves, so the speaker takes no high ground. The word "yourself" has a gentle edge, though, as if he is nudging the reader. Then come two short questions: "how would you know? / how could you tell?" The second question is almost a plea. It exposes a trap in the logic: the tool we use to check whether our thinking is sound is the thinking itself. A damaged mind would not feel damaged. It would feel certain. The poem ends on a question mark with no answer, which leaves the reader inside the problem.
It matters that the whole thing is hypothetical. Nowhere does the speaker claim that people really have become less intelligent; the key word is "if." The poem uses a thought experiment to make a point that holds either way. Certainty is cheap and doubt about ourselves is rare. A poem could have scolded readers for being angry or divided. This one gets the same result through humility, by asking everyone, including the speaker, to admit they might be wrong without knowing it.
Judging by its subject, the poem comes from the pandemic era or its aftermath, but it doesn't depend on that. Its lasting value for a young reader is the habit of mind it models: a short pause before the next argument, the next insult, the next certainty, to ask whether you can really be sure you are thinking clearly.