Crane Flies – Poem by Kevin Scanlon

Crane Flies – Poem by Kevin Scanlon

Through the open door the clumsy crane flies come in
And perform their aimless aerial dance in the room
Before clinging to the wall as if waiting for something
To happen, they look a lot like giant mosquitoes
And sometimes buzz your ears but make no buzzing sound
More like a rustling that startles you for a second
Yesterday I got out of my car and one was right there
Almost as if to greet me, they look so sad and delicate
With deciduous legs that can drop off like a lizard’s tail
Just tiny non-sentient biological automatons, that only live
A couple of weeks, which is not much less than we do
Compared to the vast sweep of geological time, we could
Be intruders on an ancient alien’s estate and never know it.