--------------
A tiny spider but a mil or two,
Vaulted in terror as my finger swept
Above him like a comet razing earth:
The domicile he kept
Disastered, gamely bristling legs like clubs,
He fled for safety to the cupboard’s bounds.
Ten days he’d commoned on that smooth white door,
Sorting his granuled founds;
I him ignored, he me, but then my hand,
Forgetful, upside-downed with whistling winds
His lunar plain’s calm atmosphere, shaking
His web-tied goods to flinds.
With caution, later, he sidled back and set
Himself again to hoard his winnowed shreds;
For him, at scale, that door’s unfeatured stretch
Was place, with meats and breads,
A neighbourhood, terrained and closely-known,
Though heavened with a void, now light, now not,
Tornadoed by destroyings beyond all grasp
Of his brain’s challenged dot.
What gulfs between that minim thing and I –
Both size and concept-handling depth of mind!
Looming, to him I’m but a whimful god,
Destructive, lenient, blind;
But then, what depths, what deeps! draw endlessly
Between the Fleshless Ones and my garbed self;
To them, had Yahweh not touched flesh I’d be
A bug upon a shelf.
Again, though Angels crowd the One’s just Hand,
Unbridgeable’s the tract that clefts His thoughts
From theirs: we none have being in ourselves
Except He stoops and wroughts.
Many’s the thinker, centuries-long, who’s twist
His mind to know what’s known-not but it show
Itself! We come, we go – truth’s behind-veiled,
And death’s its pilgrim’s glow.
So smile upon that spider’s life’s endeavours,
His treasured husks and flakes; soon he’ll fall prey
To some toothed gatherer, so let his dwelling
Prosper him his day.
====================
© July 2022
