design by CP on original photo by falco
Ringed around with roses
With tissues wiping noses
Plague has brought the sneezes
Bubonic, black, with wheezes
Eastern rats we hold to blame
Held in ships awash with shame
Fleas that carried, heat restricted
Came with cold, released, inflicted
Swelling bubos in axial joins
Painful armpits, painful groins
Sweating, coughing, life depleting
Into town and country eating
Numbers rising, mass graves seen
They didn’t know of quarantine
Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt #61: Quarantine in 67 words.
crispina kemp 
That was brilliantly done.
Here I was expecting a flowery post…
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I just saw that word, Quarantine, and thought: Ringed around. The rest followed. I think it took half an hour. Next exactly Shakespeare.
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Well I am duly impressed, Ms Crispina! Not everything must be Shakespeare to be good….
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Finding that photo, and then playing with it, took longer.
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While not too cheery … cleverly done.
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I thank you, I wouldn’t usually pick up the challenge (Quarantine in 67 words!) but I saw at once what I wanted to write; thereafter it was just a matter of finding the rhymes making the count.
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Nice take. When that happened in India long back everyone was out killing rats. Now it’s eradicated.
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Of course, while rats were part of the cycle, it’s the fleas that actually carry the infection. and those fleas will stay with the rats while the weather remains warm. But in an unusually cold period (and the Black Plague hit Europe as it was entering what’s been called the Little Ice Age) the fleas will then jump to other species. If I understand it right. I worked with a gentleman from Burma. His family had died of the plague. We in UK think it a thing of the past. It is not. I’m pleased to hear you’ve managed to eradicate it in India.
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W.H.O. declares India plague free. It was dreadful when it was here.
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I will not belittle you and yours by saying I can imagine it. No matter how much I might have read about it, I cannot begin to imagine the truth of it. I’m pleased for you and yours that India is now declared free of it.
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A cheerful romp through a disease.
You ever read Connie Willis’s “Doomsday Book,” a time travel story about two plagues?
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No. But sounds like an equally cheerful romp. I”’ investigate, and maybe put on my reading list.
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Well done. The word certainly led us there, and you have captured all the gruesome details.
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I thank you. The words just jumped at (okay, so the opening lines jumped at me) A ring:, what else can quarantine be?
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It certainly brings disease to mind.
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Does indeed
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