New piece submitted to Canadian Anti-War Poetry site

Fly in A Glass Bowl

The fly  arrived in the lunch box

carried by the navigator.

It pulsed and buzzed

probing  for a way out

of the Plexiglas bowl.

The spider tracked the Colonel

as he adjusted the bomb sight.

Squinting through cross-hairs made of spider's webbing,
weighing the moment the bomb
was to be released

in order to place the  bomb inside a 100-foot circle

from four miles in the sky.

Crouched in the Plexiglas nose of the plane
breathing pure oxygen,
the Colonel wore silk gloves
to keep his skin from freezing
to the metal on the sight.
The fly buzzed around The Colonel’s head
as he released the bomb.

A cousin to the spider that spun the web

used in the cross hair in the bomb sight,

the spider focused on the fly

encouraging it to land

close enough to be trapped and devoured.

Making its sinister move  just as the bomb burst above the Japanese city,

the spider was blinded by the flash of the intense light

not seeing the gloved hand

of The Colonel

as it came down on its body,

still clutching the fly in its dark legs.

-tp, 4-27