Bullet Casing
Squat bottle.
Who drained its amnesia?
Organ pipe.
Why emit so high a C?
Empty bud.
Where did the flower open
its red petals?
Molted exoskeleton.
What imago wouldn’t flee
such a narrow corpse?
Poems on the topic: insect
Poems on the topic “insect” on Poets.by.
Locust leafminer haiku
locust leafminers
now the leaves get more of the sky
than just sunlight
the locusts look as if
they’ve been eaten by locusts:
leafminers
Entomology
You caught me in your net of wishful hoping,
Pinned me down with needles and pins
You didn't check if I was dead first but let me feel all the pain that you had in store for me,
Why was it that you took me from my natural habitat and stripped me down until I was your definition of clean,
Let me be pressed down onto your emotions that soaked me of guilt and grief,
Then letting me dry out until I was numb
You glued me down to a back frame and let me be framed in the walls of your home,
Where no one entered and you kept me to yourself,
You took my beauty out to fit your needs
A Conference under the Sun
A weed, an insect and I
In a conference under the sun.
On the Lantana, flowers.
Pink, white and violet
They snuggle in bunches
Looking up at me like children
In awe of a giant.
Thorns prick my fingers
The stalk taut, lean like a whip
Refuses to oblige my hands
Trying to clear a path.
Then, glinting in the sun
This little Ladybird on a leaf.
Legs drawn up under the shell
She sits still, as if hoping
I wouldn’t see her.
* * *
Mountain snow fields
seen through transparent wings of a fly
on windowpane
Late Summer
late summer
the water striders jerky strokes
across the stream
The Medal
You arrived like an odd insect
That, upon extending its wings,
Belongs to all yet to no one in particular.
The grapevine beetle knows
That its time was summer and locusts,
And that before that sweltering heat and that music
Life is a bale of hay, darkness, and a thin membrane.
It recognizes a purple shell wherein
The female, quietly lurking,
Yearns to be fire and fruit.
That summer of nineteen hundred and something,
I withstood the calumny of my life
Like an emblem of molten silver,
Without shade, but rich in fruit so sweet
That milk and honey were nothing.
Milk, honey, streams
Songs of Insects
Under the night of full breath,
Fired by the wine the golden goblet-moon spilt,
The insects are mad in their tremour of hearts :
There are a thousand voices of joy and dance,
But only one song of sadness and ghost.
O passionate song of ones, I believe, returned to the ground,
Now awakening to the sad songs they still left unsung !
The spirit of a song is never content till it is fully sung :
O the passionate songs of night and wounded heart,
Are they not the cry of my soul of fever and dream ?
Indian Summer
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
The grasshopper's horn, and far off, high in the maples
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence,
Under a moon waning and worn and broken,
Tired with summer.
Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember you, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heartless.
Over my soul murmur your mute benediction
While I gaze, oh fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.
Voices of the Air
But then there comes that moment rare
When, for no cause that I can find,
The little voices of the air
Sound above all the sea and wind.
The sea and wind do then obey
And sighing, sighing double notes
Of double basses, content to play
A droning chord for the little throats--
The little throats that sing and rise
Up into the light with lovely ease
And a kind of magical, sweet surprise
To hear and know themselves for these--
For these little voices: the bee, the fly,
The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,
The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,
The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.
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