We drove them out of Europe
and this century: but on the edge
where Soviet turns Anarch,
cholera gallops from Balaklava
to stagnant Caspian estuaries;
typhoid snakes insidiously
down the Volga to Astrakhan;
amoebic and bacillary,
the sisters, run the Silk Road
and in Moscow and St.Petersburg
the poor inhale diphtheria,
cough tuberculosis
and sell the traveller syphilis
Richard George
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-plagues-of-russia/
