Saturday – Ants, Bees and Wasps

-All poems by Lynn Valentine.

BUMBLEBEE

A tricolored bumblebee, miniature engine,
revs up and slows down arrhythmically.
Alighting, abdomen curving in graceful embrace,
vacillating between sage blossoms,
a quick nuzzling exploration and then on to the next,
an industrious motor powered by fealty and pollen.

Relentless in its amassing, meticulous in its exploration.
I know it can sting, even as it follows royal edict.
I suppose I could wave it away, feigning fear,
annoyance, or an abundance of caution.
But in good conscience, its ancestors have been
on this planet so much longer than mine.

All it seeks to perform is its duty,
done to perfection, trafficking in pollen,
gentle fuzz and glistening wing,
a brief life curtailed by cruel winter.
I envy this orange, yellow and black beauty
Its distilled ability to live in the moment.

-Jeeks Raj

Fuzz bomb

There’s a fuzz bomb in the foxgloves,
there’s a buzz about the leaves;
a bumblebee has fumbled free
to zoom around my knees.

I wouldn’t be so nervous
lying out here on the lawn
if only I’d remembered
to put my trousers on.

Bizzies

I fear the cops
have pressed
the bumblebees
into service –

they’re out in force
wearing uniforms
and hi-vis vests,
knocking on windows

like badly-flown
drones, checking
we’re in lockdown;
hard fuzz battering

off the glass
and zooming away
in hot pursuit
of a sprung bluebell.

-Both poems by Andy MacGregor

-Annest Gwylim (First published in The Projectionist’s Playground)

-Paul Brookes (one of my insect sonnets first published in Fevers of the Mind)

I Forage

I forage, chew wood pulp for my babies
who give me sweetness in return. When
they’re bigger I’ll dismember aphids, fleas
and spiders to take home for them.

My queen who gave birth to me will outlive
me. At night I’m still, or repair fly
babies broken rooms. At warm light give
flight ,and scratch out fibre until I die.

I lay my own babies once, another
found out and ate them. I tend to my queen’s.
As light dims sooner and days get colder
I get slower, stiller, food for the dream.

It’s too easy, a mechanically
universe, reality is messy.

-Paul Brookes

Biogs and Links

Annest Gwilym

Author of two books of poetry: Surfacing (2018) and What the Owl Taught Me (2020), both published by Lapwing Poetry. Annest has been published in many literary journals, both online and in print, and in anthologies. She has been placed in several writing competitions, winning one. She lives on the coast of north west Wales with her rescue dog. Twitter: @AnnestGwilym

Friday – Butterflies and Moths

Trapped

Are words trapped in books?
Not able to breathe free
Like butterflies in amber

Burnt sienna-gold beauty
Like verses strung together
Are words trapped in books?

Calligraphy black on white
Glinting in the light
Like butterflies in amber

An insect and words glued in woe
Are poems written in blood?
Are words trapped in books?

Seeping with anger, sadness
Poetry written,tears of grief struck
Like butterflies in amber

Or a balm of sweet memories
A cathartic torrent of words
Are words trapped in books?
Like butterflies in amber.

-Leela Soma

monarch butterfly
delivering a message
from the great unknown

-Richard Bailly

Island Sonnets 1: Rarities

The Slender Scotch Burnet Moth clings on
to this yellow bloom, this basalt cliff:
the fragile edge of a fragmentary life
confined to islands. Under the melting sun
summer’s haze shimmers over the sea.
There’s a threat of cloud in the west. The wind spills
a scent of gorse flowers over the folded hills.
This warm day’s a welcome rarity.

There’s so much peace in my heart it’s almost pain.
I’m bracing myself to withstand the next surprise,
which isn’t coming. Ever. Only summer lies
in the days ahead. I’m facing the curious, strange,
singular thought that it may all be over and done.
I cling to that fragile edge and bask in the sun.

-Yvonne Marjot

new dawn
a butterfly drifts through
the triumphal arch
(from the Nick Virgilio Writer’s House – Haiku In Action 2021)
-John Hawkhead

Last Night I Became an Emperor Moth

I rode through the liquid night,
as a melon-slice moon crested a bank of cloud.
Part of the hush and curve of the universe;
Pleiades above me a diamond cluster ring.
Clothed in starlight, wings powdered,
furry belly glossy and plump.

Left the moor for a jaunt to the seaside,
over towns with flickering lights and strange smells.
Saw the sea corrugated by waves,
tang of salt quickening my senses.
Shimmied and played chase with the ladies,
rested with them on marram grass.

Birdsong ushered in the return of the sun;
drowsy, went home to sleep in the heather.
There to wait for my lover; my musk strong,
it will draw him from miles. He will come,
wings taut with blood. Antennae fresh as ferns.
Owl eyes pulsing with life like coals.

Red Admiral in November

Tail-end of a storm squalled over
the Atlantic – leaves and plastics
hurled over yard and path
in a mad, improvised mosaic.

Then I see it, the slight movement
of a blackened leaf shivering
on top of a pebble right under
the next step of my feet.

Gently lift him on his flint –
he opens his wings out wide
as if to the warmth of my touch,
exotic in his gaudy tapestry.

Carefully place him on a nettle stem –
he climbs, fumbling and entangled
towards the leaves, lumbering his embroidery,
summer aerobatics a memory.

I lumber, fumble back into the darkening cocoon
of my shuttered house, summer a memory.

Cabbage White

In his robe of sun he cartwheels
over autumn weeds –
a last-fling pale ballerina
among the Caravaggio opulence
of October
and its red-haired children.

This petal-light cabbage white
flits among heady colours
distilled by autumn:
root beer, cider, burgundy, rosé.
He goes there, there, there –
from ragwort to herb robert,
catsear to hawkbit.

November brings brown,
sours ripe and fruity scents,
pungent with leaf mould and fungi.
A watery sun rises low;
branches like swipes of ink
on an eau-de-nil sky;
his lifeless body blowing
in the wind with the leaves.

Doorway . . .

. . . on the roadside:
fading burgundy frame,
scored ivory windows,
set in solid blocks
of local grey stone.

Sly fingers of ivy
creep darkly over one side,
like a face needing a haircut,
steal into gaps between timber
and stone, squeeze through
quiet breaches in dry wood.

For a second a butterfly
prints red and black on it,
folds its wings as in prayer,
opens out again, cutting
a butterfly shape in the air.

Behind the door, a shady space
where flowers don’t grow.

-Annest Gwilym(from her collection What The Owl Taught Me, 2020)

(Previously published in:

Cabbage White – Poetry Space
Doorway . . . – The Cannon’s Mouth
Last Night I Became an Emperor Moth – winner of firstwriter.com’s Fifteenth International Poetry Competition 2016/17.
Red Admiral in November – Reach Poetry)

-Christina Chin

 

Haiga

moth wings
raising the silk portière
summer breeze

-Christina Chin 

 

Caterpillar Summer

One summer we kept caterpillars – nothing special, the green ones that attack cabbages. Maybe I got sick of killing them, the green mush between my finger tips. Maybe I thought it would be educational. We kept them in a propagator, fed them cabbage leaves, made sure there was water in there. Not many survived. A lot were attacked by some predator that ate them from the inside. The smell of old cabbage was vile. We persevered.

Finally we had a few chrysalises. We took the clear plastic lid off the propagator, and left the base tray open in the outside toilet over the winter. We forgot about them.

One spring morning, I went out to feed the cat, and opened the door of the outside loo. There were the butterflies, finally hatched – white-winged and fluttering. I called the kids and we admired them, and then let them fly away – to lay more eggs on more cabbages, I guess. To have their moment in the sunshine.

souls soar in spring
butterflies soak up the sun
green leaves unfurling

-Sarah Connor

-Paul Brookes (First published in The Insect Sonnets, Fevers of The Mind)

Bios and Links

-Annest Gwilym

Author of two books of poetry: Surfacing (2018) and What the Owl Taught Me (2020), both published by Lapwing Poetry. Annest has been published in many literary journals, both online and in print, and in anthologies. She has been placed in several writing competitions, winning one. She lives on the coast of north west Wales with her rescue dog. Twitter: @AnnestGwilym

-M.W. Bewick

is a writer and co-founder of the small indie publisher Dunlin Press. He grew up on the edge of the Lake District, lives in Wivenhoe, Essex. He is regularly published in poetry journals, also works as a journalist and sometimes lectures in creative writing. His second collection of poetry, Pomes Flixus, is available at https://dunlinpress.bigcartel.com/. 

Day Twenty-three

-Cherry Coombe (Published in her collection ‘On the Boats’ (UoBPress 2018))

Wednesday – Flies

The midges of Ben More

Oh the nastiest of midges are the midges of Ben More.
They lurk on the summit waiting for a bite,
and when the weather’s hot and the breeze is barely light,
they feast on weary climbers by the score.

Now the views you get from climbing are the just and fair reward
for hauling your carcass up the endless height,
but for every golden eagle, and every gorgeous sight,
a cloud of midges tries to get on board.

My back is to the mountain now, and the shimmering slopes of scree.
A cool and soothing drink is on my mind.
But my face is red and lumpy: though I left the midge behind,
I’m already scratching its itchy legacy.

I should be filled with pride because I’ve climbed my first Munro,
but the only score I’m counting is: midges thirty, climber zero

-Yvonne Marjot

 

Fly

A fly alit uninvited on the page
and promptly threw itself
into a paroxysm of personal hygiene
as if my words had sullied it.

I caught a fleeting glimpse then
of a poem just as finely-honed,
with all of that agility and presence,
but inevitably as I moved pen to paper

it was gone.

Cranefly

It haunted the high corners
of my childhood, skittering
erratically about the ceiling,
yet certain at some moment

to hurtle without warning
towards my horrified face,
trailing its limbs loosely
like a creature only half alive.

I forget when it grabbed me:
it wasn’t the fly that was half
alive; it was me. A slender crack
between this world & the next

had let something in, strange
and capricious, flighty yet fragile.
From that night forward
I left the window wide open.

Bluebottle

Someone cursed the fly,
breaking a blank look
to begrudge its presence.
Probably it too would have

preferred the great outdoors
to this barren zone,
its sixth surface a
painful transparency.

Me, I welcomed its intrusion;
blued-metal piece
of summer forcing
its velocity into the static room.

Warming to its mid-air
ricochets, fired up
for a chance at freedom,
I opened the window wide.

-Andy MacGregor

Bluebottle Triptych

I
In summer’s molten sizzle of days,
in a sleepy forest’s midday haze,
maggots hatch on a dead bird.
A white tide of squirming rice grains –
lords of death and excrement –
dismantle what it took years to create,
leaving a stack of fine bones,
dusty feathers to flap in the wind.

II
A leathery cocoon, contours of a cigar,
conceals elaborate metamorphosis:
a silent hum of frantic shifting
hidden inside the plain brown pellet.
Complete, a lid is lifted and out crawls
a brand new fly, unfurling gauzy wings.

III
Her wings in flight buzz like a chainsaw –
this low sibilation an irksome score
to picnics and barbecues, or indoors
as she bashes against windows
wondering why air is suddenly so hard.
The covellite-blue of her abdomen
and thousand-faceted eyes glisten
like rare jewels. Delicate leg bristles
taste nectar, pollinate flowers, bring diseases.
Freighted with eggs, she smells
a dead rabbit in a nearby field.

-Annest Gwilym (from her collection “What The Owl Taught Me”, 2020. Poem originally published in Reach Poetry)

Daddy Longlegs in the Attic

loose-limbed puppet,
crashes against the Velux
as if knocking on a door.

Hair-thin legs on stilts
write in italics;
wings diaphanous oars.

It dips where moss
blooms in a corner.
A spider’s noose,

nest of sticky filaments,
sheer as gossamer stockings,
stops its marionette dance.

A pounce. A stab.
A broken doll,
shrink-wrapped in silk.

-Annest Gwilym