Nature is not all birds and squirrels.
Under your feet cruel orders thrive.
Things you cannot dream of
or should not
dream of
feed one upon another;
things feed upon them,
every predator a prey,
every parasite sucked dry
by some relentless nemesis.
Look on your lawn —
eight-legged priests in bloated ease
tend their silken tapestries.
Stalk and web make buttresses,
nectar and dew the sunny glow
of rosette windows —
earth throbs with barely audible
enticements of organ threnodies —
deadly cathedral of arachnid gods!
A robed thing (too many legs
to crucify or kill) intones
Suffer the
insects
to come unto
me!
Watch how the chosen victims struggle,
captured in weed-strung ziggurats,
flyers downed, pedestrians waylaid,
sailors shanghaied and paralyzed.
This silken Karnak laced in dew
that only glimmers in early morn
before the sun erases it,
what do its gleamings signify?
They feast on every unshorn acre —
they seek to make the earth but one
necropolis of wolf and garden spider,
eating a billion souls and wanting more.
There is never enough food,
nor time enough to make more spiders!
Male spiders blind in a frenzy of sex.
Black widow brides sport hour-glass bellies
to count the narrow intervals of mating.
Their egg sacs swell with the death
of the universe.
of the universe.
Barn spider giants bask in the sunlight.
Where any beam drops down
from the heavens,
Arachne scrambles to lace it over!
Behind the walls, beneath
the well-swept
floorboards
I hear the skitter-skit of daddy-long-legs,
the spiders’ cousins,
the spiders’ cousins,
insane horsemen of hunger’s apocalypse!
A million spiders in your uncut lawn!
Eight million legs, two million venom fangs!
How many eyes? Some of them have more than two!
They never sleep! They can live forever!
Their stomachs expand to any size!
They have been at it for a hundred million years!
It is better not to think of them.
They do not want you to.
Their webs are meant to be invisible.
They kill and eat and train their offspring silently.
There are more of them every year.
You will now forget that you have ever read this!
Love the poem! Spiders are interesting (from a distance, or in amber).
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