The Insect God - Michael Mantler

O What has become of Millicent Frastley?

Is there any hope that she is still alive?

Why haven’t they found her?

It’s rather ghastly

To think that the child was not yet five

The dear little thing was last seen playing

Alone by herself at the edge of the park

There was no one with her to keep her from straying

Away in the shadows and oncoming dark

Before she could do so, a silent and glittering

Black motor drew up where she sat nibbling grass

From within came a nearly inaudible twittering

A tiny green face peered out through the glass

She was ready to flee, when the figured beckoned

An arm with two elbows held out a tin

Full of cinnamon balls, she paused, a second

Reached out as she took one, and lifted her in

The nurse was discovered collapsed in some shrubbery

But her reappearance was not much use

Her eyes were askew, her extremities rubbery

Her clothing was stained with a brownish juice

She was questioned in hopes her answers revealing

What had happened, she merely repeatedly said

‘I hear them walking about on the ceiling'

She had gone irretrievably out of her head

O feelings of horror, resentment and pity

For things which so seldom turn out for the best

The car, unobserved, sped away from the city

As the last of the light died out in the west

The Frastley’s grew sick with apprehension

Which a heavy tea only helped to increase

Though the felt it was scarcely genteel to mention

The loss of their child, they called in the police

Through unvisited hamlets the cars went creeping

With its head lamps unlit and its curtains drawn

Those natives who happened not to be sleeping

Heard it pass and lay awake till dawn

The police with their torches and notebooks descended

On the haunts of the underworld, looking for clues

In spite of their praiseworthy efforts, they ended

With nothing at all in the way of news

The car, after hours and hours of travel

Arrived at a gate in an endless wall

It rolled up a drive and stopped on the gravel

At the floor of a vast and crumbling wall

As the night wore away hope started to languish

And soon was replaced by all manner of fears

The family twisted their fingers in anguish

Or got them all damp from the flow of their tears

They removed the child to the ballroom, whose hangings

And mirrors were streaked with a luminous slime

They leapt through the air with buzzings and twangings

To work themselves up to a ritual crime

They stunned her and stripped off her garments, and lastly

They stuffed her inside a kind of pod

And then it was that Millicent Frastley

Was sacrificed to the insect god