Cockroach
Across the white of table bread and yellow plated cheese
Upon the black fictitious grapes, it wheezes its disease
It crawls, its scrawny legs cluttering the revulsion's sight
Look at this nocturnal insect parading pride in pallid light
And so one, then suddenly a thousand more, and still more
From draw I thought secured, from every vessel held in store
The little beasts come dragging a gay appetite to the floor
And with so much resilience, so much flare, some would adore
But I, something in the hygiene of my upbringing, shudders me
With looming tragedy for this, a population depleted I see
By pest and pestilential tolerance, trembles me now with rage
That cockroach could destroy us, and rule the coming age.
Mutating from the fission and fusion that left us hopeless, bare
The fallout from divine grace, and this shimmering cold now here
What shall be our harvest, except the wintry white of fear
Nothing saps their resistance now, the cockroach is everywhere
Profile this, in every four thousand species plus, every size and shape
Four common species threatens our mortal dust, O wanton rape
Think you that their triumph shall not call from hell more tragic forms
To chew and shred and intoxicate the procreation of our norms
I hear the scratching of the spindly legs, see sick white chitinous wings
I am filled such foreboding of the plaques this evil brings
And we make boundaries with indifference, call them the species at risk
Forbid their public swatting, stomping, crushing them quick and brisk
O let me see the putrid gut inside, let me hear the crunch of flesh
Let me use the new insecticide to bomb them from behind the mesh
Splatter them where they fester, let us kill this insect by decree
What though some berate us, for we make a dark hole in ecology.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2010
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