The notes for this poem started as a continuing requiem for the loss of the trees in the car park of my local swimming pool, but I was soon deflected from such sombre thoughts by recalling the tone of amazed disbelief that Toni used when telling me that he had killed a mosquito defiantly flying around the bedroom.  I suppose that it was inevitable that his sense of outrage that such creatures would be alive and biting in early March would make its way into my writing!
          There is part of me that thinks that I should be bewailing the destruction of the mass of vegetation that is rapidly being written out of memory, but that dead mosquito was much more powerful!

Early March

The pages in my notebook

stutter in a wayward breeze

that soon will cough to calm.

I do not need a coat.

And when the air is still,

the sun is hot.

My shins are prickling beneath

my jeans.  My spectacles have

darkened, and yet still I

squint against the light.

On such a day it comes as

no surprise to hear that

the mosquito first to taste

his blood, Toni has killed.

The season’s first,

of many yet to die.

So, protocols of summer

will be engaged:

all doors and windows

must be closed and hearing

tweaked to catch the

threatening buzz.

And we’ll be under siege

again, with all too many gaps

in our defence that let

the tiny ‘tigers’ in.

Eventually, in later months

(and battle scarred)

we’ll go into the cold –

and wish our enemies

were back again.

I feel that it is more than coincidence that the Killing of the First Mosquito of the Season coincided with my first real sunbathe of the year.  Life, as is obvious, is a constant balance between what you want and what you have to pay for it!