Photo by Diena Grant-Thomson

Spider

by John Wright

This overcast morning
leaf and lawn are drenched in dew-soaked air.
My window frames a filigree masterpiece
of lilli-pilli pollen buds and scribbling eucalypts.
I watch a bulbous spider
beige as paper-bark, build her web
busily embroidering
a white St Andrew’s Cross
oblivious to the beauty of all she is.
She tats a delicate network of interconnections
weaving no frills.
She spins beyond entanglement
labouring to create a nest for new life
while lacing, with precise obsessive care
a jewelled snare.
In circular creation, beginnings are ends.
Her life-&-death work
is designed to attract innocence that strays.
This dull gun-metal day, beside a dry
leaf-curl mysteriously spinning
in no breeze, on a single invisible
thread, she sits and waits.
Bright yellow stripes across her back
warn the wary she’s there.
Her four pairs of long legs
have become the white diagonal
preparing to pounce and wrap
the future in a shroud of silk.
She knows the fate of prey.
And as she waits under a veiled sun, poised
at the centre of her mythology
her abdomen grows.
She knows her children will be fed.
Ready to kill or burst
with life, she glows.

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John Wright was born in Cheshire, England 1950. Visits to County Mayo, Ireland in childhood left lasting impressions as did weekend work on a farm in Cheshire. Arriving in Australia in 1969, he worked as a psychiatric nurse and received the NSW Premier’s Award for 40 years Meritorious Service. His poems have been published since the 1980s. Now retired, he lives with his family near Gosford on the Central Coast of NSW. His current book, CHESHIRE BORN
was published in 2011 by Balboa Press.