Ten short lines, no rhyme, and a title that sounds like a lullaby with a lab coat on. In "Little song of epidemiology," Dave Bonta pairs the gentle diminutive "little song" with a science concerned with how sickness travels. The poem lives in the gap between the two. It never names a disease, a place or an outbreak, so everything it says comes through images.
It opens with a pair of mouths: "Mouth of the queen, / mouth of the horse." The repeated phrase flattens rank, since a monarch and an animal are equal as hosts. It also faintly recalls the saying "straight from the horse's mouth," meaning information from the original source, and tracing a source is what epidemiologists do. That is my reading rather than something the poem announces, but the echo fits. The dash then turns the opening into a question: "what will become of / the young disease?" Calling the disease "young" makes it a child or an animal, something newly born that has to find its way. The line break after "of" leaves the sentence hanging, as if the question has no firm ground under it.
The strangest line comes next: "Like a sling, / a mouth needs content." A sling is useless empty. It needs a stone to throw. A mouth, likewise, needs something to send out, and the poem leaves open what that might be. It could be words, breath, food or a kiss, and judging by the title it could be a germ. "Content" also works as a pun, meaning both "what is contained" and, if you stress the second syllable, "satisfied." The line suggests that a mouth is never really empty or at rest. It is always loaded and ready to launch something, and a young disease finds shelter in exactly that readiness. Gossip works the same way, and so does a song. The poem itself is a small piece of content waiting to be passed along.
The last three lines answer the question about the young disease without quite saying so: "After dinner / comes a husband to a wife, / night to the coffeehouse, / a horse to a rogue." The word "comes" governs all three arrivals, and the inverted grammar, with the verb first, gives them the cadence of a folk saying. Each pairing is a different kind of contact. A husband and wife are the most intimate. Night arriving at a coffeehouse, with night personified as a customer, is public, crowded and sociable. A horse going to a rogue is a transaction, an animal changing hands, perhaps unfairly. So the poem moves from home to café to marketplace, which is more or less how an epidemiologist maps a spread. The horse also returns from the second line, now moving from one owner to another. That small repetition makes the poem feel closed in on itself, as though everything is connected to everything else.
The rhythm supports this. The opening lines are short, four syllables each, and clipped. By the end the lines have stretched to six and seven syllables ("comes a husband to a wife"), so the poem physically widens as the disease would. There is no rhyme, but there are quiet sound echoes. The long *e* of "queen" returns in "disease," and "mouth" and "horse" are sounds that sit in the front and back of the throat, so even the vowels seem to be passing from mouth to mouth.
What makes the poem worth reading is its deadpan tone. Nothing in it is alarming. Dinner, marriage, a night out and a bit of horse-trading are all gentle, human routines, and that is where the menace lies. The poem suggests that disease follows our habits, affections and bargains rather than sneaking in from outside. The question about the "young disease" is never answered directly, because the list of evening pleasures is the answer. In ten lines, Bonta makes a scientific subject feel like a nursery rhyme with an uneasy undertone.