It came on boats

From distant seas,

On the backs of rats,

Too small to see,

Brought to the shore’s

In a sickness in the flea’s

On the shirts, and on the sleeves,

Of the sailors, and the suitors,

On the captains and on the thieves.



The sick spread fair as pirates plunder

And rolled across the land like thunder,

The vomiting, and constant fever,

Boils on necks and armpit’s under,

Blotches black and purple, cover,

Bodies botched, bereft of slumber.



Coughing children shunned by mothers,

Sisters turned on aunts and brothers,

Fear turned families into strangers,

While Babies coughed and died in manger’s



Wagons stacked with bodies, dragged,

And Strewn across the back like rags,

Piled like bags, young men and hags,

Like a farmer selling scarecrows,

Or a hunter selling stags.



And a hunger you can’t abide,

Once the butchers and the bakers died,

No fishers left to raid the tides,

No market stalls where fish wives pried.



But Cattle churned with yearning udders,

While farmers buried sons and brothers,

And the sun shun bright, on fields that heed,

In need of harvest, for meals and mead.



At first the People tossed in pews,

As rats ran dancing across their shoes

But now it’s quiet without Hysterics,

Gone are Chaplin’s, priests and clerics.



At the head of this snake,

are the eyes of this plight,

In the people in the pits,

purpose built for the blight.

Tailor made for the pox,

without nails or a box,

While others lay in fields,

making meals for a Fox.



Doctors died while doctors tried,

To stem, to stop, to slow the slide,

No cure it all, or snake oil vial,

No magic made from guts and bile.

Could foil those fleas, those minuet nukes,

To live at all, was chance and fluke.



Then alas, at last, it killed it’s last,

Two hundred million death blows cast,

kings and Cretans, killed in mass,

Now pushing daisies up through grass.



History is a burning page,

Full of famine, fighting, pests and plagues,

So next, your depressed and feeling forlorn,

Remember those people fought,

So that you could be born.


















© James Moynihan