* By What Right: Does Intolerance Rule? Poem by Terence George Craddock

(a study questioning prejudice and intolerance)

Tell me by what right
do we live do we die?


The fly bothers me
with its buzzing,
its flight about upon
my naked sun soaking up skin,
in this moment sustaining need
for unseasonal hot autumn
sun soaking relaxation.

The fly bothers us
several flies buzzing alighting
upon my bare legs my knees.

I will not tolerate it
I will kill it.
Does it have a right to live?

It disturbs me.

A fly. Flies.
Have but a moment
to live to die.


The man bothers me us
with his smell
his unbelonging personal hell.
My. Our Tolerance. Does not allow,
for him, for cultural differences,
for ethnic reality, in which he lives.

The man bothers me
the drunks the gangs the fighting
the dysfunctional dishevelled lives.

I will not tolerate it.
I will not accept it.
I will reject it.

They are disdained disrespected distanced
dregs of dispossessing dehumanized society.

They have no part place
in grandiosed all inclusive humanity
when theory impacts with reality.


Isolated in filth in rags in stupor
in the cold of dark cosmopolitan urban nights
the wash-outs the no hopers drug addicts thieves
isolated cause of crime in our caring prodigal society.

I kill them with indifference
as surely as I kill the fly
with decisive intolerance.

They have but a moment
to live to die.
We have but a moment
to live to die.

A crowd composed of sun seeking flies.
Now suns upon concrete door-step,
in subdued light of late afternoon sunshine.

I wave my arms about them
and they dance in late afternoon sunshine.


I conduct a cloud of flies
in congruent rhapsody of aerial ballet.


Copyright © Terence George Craddock