Poetry Friday: Daddy Longlegs

We have quite a lot of spiders in our house, not Daddy Longlegs, but a bunch of large-ish spiders who live way up in the corners of our high-ceilings. I’m not a stickler about sweeping their webs down. I don’t mind sharing our space with them, and after reading Ted Kooser’s poem, I mind even less.

Daddy Longlegs – by Ted Kooser

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

(from The Poetry Foundation)