Arlene Corwin writes

Words That Changed Our Lives: 

Pandemic, Pandemonium, Endemic

Words that show lives but a tribe:

There to scribe, describe our lives. 

Words that come from health or sickness: mind and body:

Words from which no-one escapes:

Fearlessness, speechlessness, endlessness;

Dangerousness, selfishness;

Sowing seeds of mental shapes 

That come from mind-to-mouth.

Now’s come the time to learn some new:

Epidemic and Pandemic, 

Plus another word to view: Endemic.

Just a few, but whew! 

Let me put you in the picture,

Hoping that it’s not titanic - the Titanic!

First come epidemics:

Measles, smallpox, influenzas…

How to conquer, name and aim,

How could and could we cure the sum?  

We do sometimes rule over some -

But vanquished? Germs and virus are not dumb,

Survive anti-biotically, the foe of symbiotically.

It is the year two thousand twenty:

Epidemic now pandemic,

Plentiful and more than plenty;

Too, too many - far too many.

Struck by the invisible;

We, vaccine-less, susceptible, 

Daring not to breathe or touch,

Wondering, asking when will it become too much?

Thus we leave the first word, 

Come to the last, worst word:

Endemic: 

Some background forever found somewhere;

Will not be killed, wiped out or cleared;

And underground a countlesss year

Alive and well and waiting for…

 

pandemonium:wild and noisy disorder or confusion; uproar: there was complete pandemonium—everyone just panicked. ORIGIN mid 17th century: modern Latin (denoting the place of all demons, in Milton's Paradise Lost), from pan- ‘all’ + Greek daimōn ‘demon’.

 

pandemic: (of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world; an outbreak of a pandemic disease: the results may have been skewed by an influenza pandemic.

 

endemic (adjective): (of a disease or condition) regularly found among particular people or in a certain area: complacency is endemic in industry today.• [attributive] (of an area) in which a particular disease is regularly found: the persistence of infection on pastures in endemic areas.