POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt
POeT SHOTS #5, Series C
The Fly
She sat on a willow-trunk
watching
part of the battle of Crecy,
the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.
During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.
She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disemboweled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.
With relief she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.
When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies
and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,
she began to lay her eggs
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.
And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.
It would take a Czech to know European history. And an immunologist to focus on a tiny fly. Striking gruesome humor: “She sat on a disemboweled horse/meditating/on the immortality of flies.” “She alighted/on the blue tongue/of the Duke of Clervaux.” “She began to lay her eggs/on the single eye/of Johann Uhr.”
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.