Fly in Amber
by Leo Yankevich
At present there’s a mall and a strip show.
Ronald McDonald waves to passing cars.
And yet a hundred million years ago
a forest stood beneath the same bright stars.
The Great Bear was still nameless in the sky.
There were no men to gaze up at the moon,
to hide in terror, holding back a cry.
In deep December it was sultry June.
The fly lay soused in sticky sap since dawn.
Yet thousands of millennia had fled
till it was picked up from the forest lawn.
A hapless hunter bartered it for bread.
Now a barfly pawns it for cold beer
and an æon seems but a single year.
Read more formal poetry by Leo Yankevich and others at the New Formalist Press.