The Flies
       

You praise the bees for their industry and honey
as if they were poets of the sun, and we
barbarians who couldn't give a shit
about flowers; you revile us as evildoers

of the hot, fly-blown seasides of decay;
blue bottles, green bottles, punk
scavengers, embezzlers, outsiders
inside, obsessed with the small print, always

missing the high window of freedom
behind us, above us, over and over, trapped
on a vertical stage of glass —
forever on the wrong side of the light.

But your war zones and panoramas of disaster
are famously our fields of treasure,
your sufferings and little cries, our data;
we scent death's augury from ten miles away;

arriving at the scene before ravens, before crows,
before all other reporters, we get
the breaking story; we worship and adore
the half-life of flesh, fear's salts, tears' spirits,

and observe from every hidden camera angle,
zoom-lensed, fast-forward shutter speed, to catch
your command performances of love and death —
for every ointment, a fly; why?

Because no matter how many you kill
in unholy battle, or the numberless who lie
on the memorial of the windowsill,
we are with you, as it always was

and ever shall be; we are more like you
than you care to know; time is wound tight
as revenge in our concentrated hearts;
summer's light is brief, and there is much to do

in the great work of our master;
not in the harmonious hum of the chantry hive,
but in the ceaseless buzzing of the air,
and the long silence of your open mouths.

Tweet

Copyright © 2019 Nick Drake All rights reserved
from Out of Range
Bloodaxe Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission