Poets, clustered like spiders, sing
shrilly of the gadfly’s wing
and make of air and dust and flesh
a subtle and a silver mesh,
study the seasons and the trends
times, fashions, tides, for their own ends;
all is foretold, all comes to pass
spun, spinning, in a web of glass;
brooding above the throng of flies
they watch with penetrating eyes
and turn the living and the dead
impartially to daily bread.
From: Aiken, Joan, The Skin Spinners: Poems, 1976, The Viking Press: New York, p. 57.
(https://archive.org/stream/skinspinnerspoem00aike)
Date: 1960
By: Joan Delano Aiken (1924-2004)
From Troubles of The World 