For those who can’t read pictures and don’t want to click links:

“Kinder Than Man” by Althea Davis

And God
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go someplace
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.
If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.

(Note: the image titles the poem as “The Crime Of Being Small”, but the actual title appears to be “Kinder Than Man”.)

glue traps are barbaric. Protip: if you have rats/mice, get a humane capture cage, and take them to somewhere with water and food for them then release.

Lovely. Seems (could be wrong) the title is actually Kinder than Man at which link those of us who hate bloody pictures of poems can have the text.

pity the poor spiders

i have just been reading
an advertisement of a certain
roach exterminator
the human race little knows
all the sadness it
causes in the insect world
i remember some weeks ago
meeting a middle aged spider
she was weeping
what is the trouble i asked

it is these cursed
fly swatters she replied
they kill off all the flies
and my family and i are starving
to death it struck me as
so pathetic that i made
a little song about it
as follows to wit

twas an elderly mother spider
grown gaunt and fierce and gray
with her little ones crouched beside her
who wept as she sang this lay

curses on these here swatters
what kills off all the flies
for me and my little daughters
unless we eats we dies

swattin and swattin and swattin
tis little else you hear
and we’ll soon be dead and forgotten
with the cost of living so dear

my husband he up and left me
lured off by a centipede
and he says as he bereft me
tis wrong but i ll get a feed

and me a working and working
scouring the streets for food
faithful and never shirking
doing the best i could

only a withered spider
feeble and worn and old
and this is what
you do when you swat
you swatters cruel and cold

curses on these here swatters
what kills off all the flies
me and my poor little daughters
unless we eats we dies

i will admit that some
of the insects do not lead
noble lives but is every
man s hand to be against them
yours for less justice
and more charity

-archy

By Don Marquis