Slowly working up steam. About Defcon 3 I’d say. Alert but not alarmed. 

This doesn’t quite say what I was intending to say (or at least, not in the way I was trying to say it) when I started the poem, but it will have to do as midnight is approaching.

*****

not so little chickens

while the wet markets of Wuhan & elsewhere might be
(rightly) copping criticism as hotbeds for terrifying new
viral species-hoppers even scarier prospects face every
one of us at much closer distances to hearth & home

for our modern factory chicken facilities are now far closer
to laboratories than farms where the paltry poultry are more
like drug-addled addicts than the cutesy feathered friends
we envisage scratching round in green country gardens for grubs

today owing to genetic streamlining, stress, & overcrowding
vaccines, sulfa drugs & antibiotics are routinely added
to feed to combat the toxic bloodbath of immunodeficiencies
cancerous tumours, pus, faecal matter, & bacterial contamination

it is from one of these noble agribusinesses many virologists believe
the next great pathogen will emerge to indiscriminately kill
                                                                                                                  both fowl & man