He lay splattered across my
wife’s emptied plate – now void
aside from this wasp’s corpse – flailed
by a fly-swatter repurposed:
wasp swapped for fly.
One wing conveniently
remains intact, shooting straight
up, like the arm of a child
anxious with an answer,
or a washroom request.
Of course, I grabbed the
dinnertime demon by the
sleeve and tossed him over
the guard rail into the
garden below.
No words were said over
his body; no proper burial;
no notice on some wasp website;
no memorial for him aside
from this poem.
which memorial is, truth be told, quite profound. Maybe the wing was the request for notice…
Thanks Matthew. You might be right! The graveyard picture on the FB and Twitter page, you might be interested in knowing, is from Iceland.
Have you tried reading this aloud? “…wasp swapped…” is tough!
That said, I really like the poem. It’s quite an interesting variation on the lilies of the field and birds of the air theme I remember hearing about!
Yes, indeed I have read it aloud. It seems that there is more than one way to tie a Gordian knot! But you are right… no lilies here, although the wasp may well become a bit of compost for a flower of some sort next year. The cycle of life is not all sunshine and roses, it seems!