The Moor's Plague of Gnats

A bona fide Plague.

Little black helicopters (arse down, head up)

In vertical flights aimed straight at the face.

Others hovered, loose and loitering,

Feets above heather and bog-reed.

Yet more yo-yoed 

On the springs of the thick breeze.

As one, they thickened all directions of the sweaty air.

A totality; a dense, black moor-mist enclosing us.

The flies landed on bare arms 

To suck out blood – 

Speck by speck.

The inner sanctums of ear and mouth: profusely raided.

I swallowed one, then I swallowed one, then one, another…

So I turned my shirt protecting veil.

Soon I was choking on their thick mass;

Drowning in sea of insect flesh.

The moor (the flies’ haven) stretched out in front;

Though I couldn’t see its shores

I ran a sucking peat that kept me slow.

My boy’s fear, far in front.

Despite their mass, their number,

There was no sound -
No low, portentous buzz.

(That pylon-drone of wood wasps.)

I hadn’t expected that silence;

Though, in a Biblical-kind-of-a-way, 

Their quiet, combined purpose,

Still seemed evil to a spineless mind.

Yes. It had to be Biblical! Didn’t it?

Yet this event, of a thousand thousand gnats, 

Was as Biblical as anything!

What had folk done to be victims of a Plague?

A plague as black as that plague of locusts was green.

And I’ve never read Keats spin a nature ode 

To these little bastards.