Germs of the Earth

CHORUS (to begin, and after each verse):

We are the germs of the earth
Against the giants of might,
All over you and the tide and the land
Where you hunt and you feast and you fight,
Infesting your crops and your homes and your lives
As Nature gives us the right,
And you've beat us before and you'll beat us again
But we'll feast in your bodies tonight.

Your parents and ours were one
In the days of life's early dawning.
But while you've become complex and grown
We've stayed much as we were in that morning.
   But the biggest and strongest may not come out best:
   Small beasts ate the eggs in Tyrannosaur's nest
   And a hero can die of a cold in the chest
As surely as arrows or hunger.

For we are....

Bacterium, virus, and spore,
We have you vastly outnumbered
Yet you never suspected before
Van Leeuwenhoek first looked and wondered.
   You took so long discovering what lay within,
   Blaming sickness on spirits, on stars, or on sin,
   Or on humors or hexes or who you had been
In a previous earthly existence.

But we are....

We've killed far more than your wars,
Your invasions, feuds, revolutions,
Obeying the natural laws
Of survival and evolution
   Though you keep finding medicines wondrous and new
   We fight our way back every time that you do,
   Reproducing ten thousand times faster than you
And evolving our way to resistance.

For we are....

You think of yourselves as our foes
Who'd eradicate us without pity,
But we never could spread half so fast
Before you invented the city.
   And with antibiotics in all of your meat
   You're making us tougher and harder to beat
   And forgetting the lesson you learned on the street:
"What don't kill us off makes us stronger."

We are the germs of the earth
Against the giants of might,
All over you and the tide and the land
Where you hunt and you feast and you fight,
Infesting your crops and your homes and your lives
As Nature gives us the right,
And you've beat us before and you kill us each day
But we feast in your bodies each night!