PESTILENCE war famine death
The four horsemen of the apocalypse
Of which Americans know nothing
Except what movies novels
Imagination might create
Think influenza 1918
Not your garden variety flu
A little aching a week in bed
Of one hundred million
One half million dead
Four times the Americans
Dead of World War One
Nine of ten perished in some Alaskan towns
All the adults many young people
Left children with none to care for them
Steelworkers dropped so fast
Companies hired out of state
Neighbors taken from one home
Then another got sick one morning
Hauled out the next world over
No country spared everywhere
Funeral bells tolling all day
One of every four of us took ill
Many survived which was little comfort
Knowing flu happened every winter
People feared polio nowhere
Near as severe or as sudden
AIDS was confined within small
Populations Haitians needle sharers
Homosexuals only the promiscuous
Needed to worry we discovered
How many that was you realized
You were having sex not just with her
But with everyone she’d had sex with
Informed you were careful
Most of the time no one’s left
Who remembers the Spanish Flu
Who remembers bubonic plague
But jetting all over the world
Makes one case of Ebola
In Africa a cause to close airports to
International flights could you catch
Ebola from pictures of bodies
Carted out of shacks in Liberia
Guinea Sierra Leone
Then the infected flew over here
Country went nuts but didn’t get sick
Kaci Hickox wouldn’t put up
With her governor’s rants rode her bike
Any damned where she pleased
Scared a lot of people along the way
Ebola is not just a bad way to die
Not that any are good ways
But you had to touch it to get it
Had it been like influenza all you
Had to do was breathe it in
People dropping to horrible deaths
All around you scared to inhale
That would be pestilence
Of which none of us knows
c. J.S.Manista, 2015
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