The insects are often forgotten, yet they are deserving of compassion too.
Image by Christopher Jobson on February 3, 2012
Liberation
by Danae Wilkin
The wind is breathing,
skimming atop mini-peaks
a swimmer’s wake
Pool prisms wave west to east,
shimmering and shade
like a braided river
announcing glaciers lost
with suspended sediment
making teal the water holding
rock, dust, and ancient air,
aqua as the chlorine pond
where she walks
up to her neck.
Within her eyeline,
little guys and gals float about.
Some gave up thrashing,
succumbed.
New arrivals
still in shock,
fighting the liquid death
that they once thought friend,
getting a cool taste,
suddenly ensnared.
She judges not.
Moth pumice gray,
the hardest to rescue,
for the residue on wings
once removed dooms the silvery ones
even as they dry on the concrete and brick lip.
Mud bees striped like hornets,
crawl up her delicate hands,
as do frightened honeybees.
She holds a flying ant;
it stings her for her efforts.
She cradles the bees, the moth,
or else leaf-scoops them like the wasp.
None complain,
their sticky six grabbing her
like a life saver,
setting them down beyond the bricks
as they clean and flap and dry,
then take off to other skies
under the beating sun:
its heart knowing none and all,
an existence impartial to such things.
She only finds drowned dragonflies
and many cement-colored arachnids.
Sadness ensues.
In home,
the flies she springs with mere cleverness:
closing the blinds,
turning off lights,
opening a door into the daylight.
They go toward the brightness
as we may one day,
our deliverance
from solipsistic-prison.
The buzzing ones in the yard
avoid summer flecks
of the hose shower she gives
to swords of grass.
To them, summer green and wheat yellow
are launching pads,
to release the spirit,
once again.
This is a trip that would never have entered into my consciousness, to say nothing of the incredible word smithing going on as you illuminate the pathway. I've never thought of anything as being grabbed like a life saver (neither the minty kind nor the naval kind). And I'm not ready to walk into the light from this solopsistic life, but you have certainly put a new twist on that upcoming venture also. Original from beginning to end. And brilliant, Danae.
A surreal vision of lives tiny and generally unseen with dangers lurking and only the faintest of possibilities that some god-like entity might compassionately intervene.
A stunning example of how art can be used to change attitudes. For a very long time now, corporate America has been selling the public on perfection in everything that has been wrecking havoc on our natural world. Fortunately, there is a rising activism involving people who see the light, like you, and raise a warning.
Insects and smaller lifeforms like bacteria, fungus and mold, have been so misunderstood and embattled by those seeking cleanliness and perfection that many species are on the verge of extinction before they have even been discovered. Your reference to the melting glaciers and climate change is perhaps, the most devastating, but there are many fronts where we are hypocrites when we "must" have exotic wood or hardwood floors when rain forests are being cut down worldwide to provide these luxuries at our local home improvement store. And then, there are convenience items like Roundup and so many other herbicides and pesticides used with abandon along with antibiotics supposedly making our lives better.
One time I asked my Thai roommate to spray some yellowjackets that were stinging me when I mowed the lawn and drove over their homes. He did it, but objected mightily because he said he was a Buddhist. And then, later in his home. I saw him take a cloth and gently wipe the ants that had crawled up on the breakfast table to savor some spilled sugar there off the table so that we could have breakfast. Later, I was mowing a stretch of lawn with a spot with taller grass when I accidentally ran into a nest of baby cottontails. I was devastated.
We need more poems like this waking everyone up to protecting the unseen and not being so pretentious about what is seen.
Odin Roark - We can only hope one sees beyond the obvious, for what this mortal experiences is most likely what nature intended. How self-interested are many of us, forgetting the connection we have, and are obligation to respect, nature in all her manifestations. Perhaps of greatest importance in this gem--pertaining to a subject few write about-- is the consciousness imbued into the word choices, the images, their color, texture and sound of her surroundings, her bond with nature and the compassion with which she addresses it. Original and moving. Bravo!
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Well said
m
Insects and smaller lifeforms like bacteria, fungus and mold, have been so misunderstood and embattled by those seeking cleanliness and perfection that many species are on the verge of extinction before they have even been discovered. Your reference to the melting glaciers and climate change is perhaps, the most devastating, but there are many fronts where we are hypocrites when we "must" have exotic wood or hardwood floors when rain forests are being cut down worldwide to provide these luxuries at our local home improvement store. And then, there are convenience items like Roundup and so many other herbicides and pesticides used with abandon along with antibiotics supposedly making our lives better.
One time I asked my Thai roommate to spray some yellowjackets that were stinging me when I mowed the lawn and drove over their homes. He did it, but objected mightily because he said he was a Buddhist. And then, later in his home. I saw him take a cloth and gently wipe the ants that had crawled up on the breakfast table to savor some spilled sugar there off the table so that we could have breakfast. Later, I was mowing a stretch of lawn with a spot with taller grass when I accidentally ran into a nest of baby cottontails. I was devastated.
We need more poems like this waking everyone up to protecting the unseen and not being so pretentious about what is seen.
Ron
Michael D.