From our high ladders in spring we
ripped boards off the old farmhouse wall
and dreamed our plans for your new barn.
Crowbars snapped a century of dust
into hair, nose, lung. We tasted
death, birth, celebration, sorrow.

Our third course of prying liberated the flies.
Like sizzling, crawling dust they
infested our noses and our mouths, clung
by thousands to our hair and faces, they
scrabbled down shirt collars, up our
sleeves and pants legs, where we

slapped and scooped and cringed against the
scratchings of a swarm of legs, the
crisp tickle of those frantic wings.
One-handed on ladder-tops, we fought
this curse, tucked our shirts over our mouths,
breathed deep and kept on working.

We wanted that wood. No one would salvage
for us. Rich in friendship, wallets empty,
we shuddered on into the filthy days.
Now I train guerrillas in rescue, and
green meat stinks the roadside grass:
somebody’s son, brother, husband.

His penis rots in a slack, speechless mouth.
Two men vomit; one swats at flies,
coughs, contemplates the smoky horizon.
How these maggots, those sons and daughters
of that ludicrous marriage of flies, love us!
His split, swollen belly buzzes and whispers

in this egg-laying frenzy. He shimmers
with sunlight off a blanket of busy wings.
His family wants him. We lift, and
his legs slip out of his pants, these
two purple clubs a last joke from the death squad.
Empty pants legs flap the blistering breeze

and still ripple through my restless dreams.
I hate some men, a few pernicious women,
and all those persistent, ubiquitous flies.

........................--Bill Ransom
........................13 October 02