translated from the original by Miroslav Holub
She sat on a willow-trunk
watching
part of the battle of Crécy,
the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.
During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.
She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.
With relief she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.
When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies
and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,
she began to lay her eggs
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.
And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrées.
George Theiner, 1928-1988 – “The Fly” from Miroslav Holub: Poems Before and After
