Secret Sonnet For The Cockroach
       

They live without their bodies for a week,
you know — subsisting on the head, the mind
alone — they flit like frogs beside a creek
whenever pounding footsteps come to grind
their crunchy shells into some pristine hard-
wood floor. You stamp on one, and six white eggs
are jettisoned inside a fibrous shard
they say is tougher than a whiskey keg.
Four billion years and evolution's passed
them by — this crevice-living dinosaur,
resisting every futile fog and gas-
filled labyrinth — unlike the Minotaur —
bull-headed, eggless doorman of the maze —
that mythic locus Theseus embraced.

Copyright © 2009 Alex Grant All rights reserved
from Fear of Moving Water
Wind Publications
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission