Elegy For A Spider (By A Chronic Arachnophobic) Poem by Alice Kriel

There you sat
guarding the door
of the space
I think of as my room.
You are exotic
and foreign to my senses;
I have never seen
one such as you.
I should respect
and treasure you
for the unique creation you are.
You move like the wind
on your two cubed legs.
You make silken thread
strong enough to catch others.
You produce a chemical
lethal to those you choose
to infect it with.
But you only kill
when you must.
You eat your victims,
their death serves a purpose –
such a noble creature.
I’m frightened out of my “wits”,
so frightened that I find someone
else to get rid of you.
They spray you
with synthetic poison –
yet, you do not die.
They swat at you
with machine-made objects –
yet, you do not die.
Then one unfortunate blow
flattens you, brave warrior.
Your coffin – toilet paper.
Your final resting place – the dustbin.
You, superior hunter, have died
an unworthy death,
because I am frightened of you,
and in doing so, I prove myself
less advanced than I would like to think.

I wish to beg your forgiveness,
but your species has no need for it.
Only humans have need of guilt,
repentance, forgiveness, redemption
for we are the only species that sins.
Still, I wish you could forgive me
for this grave evil.
I wish you could relieve
the burden of my heavy conscience,
but I think it is there to weigh
my hand down to my side
when I see another creature
more noble than I.

Even though you might have had
the ability to harm me,
you lifted not one of your eight legs
to approach me.
Yet a human uses both its hands,
arms and even legs
to kill you.

And to think we’re ignorant enough
to call ourselves the most evolved of all life forms.