Your eyes that pierce
the asters in September
know beauty in this, too:
a cave where bats
are twenty million
and the air from excrement
kills all others who would enter
yet forty million silent wings
fold around
the gentle beasts
hanging upside down, clinging close
together in the dark
below, the living floor retches, boils
heaves upward with the force
of insects who exist to strip
flesh from faltered,
hapless young,
those who fail the sanctuary
mighty light, please
guide my wings to rise
fly above the terror
escape me from the cruel jaws
of death that scuttles underneath
all that lives, all that waits
Copyright 2004 Jody Serey. All Rights Reserved.