Pest?

The first wasp of the season is something to note; it is a flying indication that summer or something spring-like is near.  OK, the wasp may have been lured into the wide open though a freakishly summery day, but it is a harbinger of warmer days ahead.

     I suppose it was my observation of the creature rather than a frantic flapping as it approached my cup of tea and baguette after my customary swim than started my jottings.  Although I suppose it is tempting fate to say it, I have never been stung by a wasp.  Indeed, now I come to consider it, I don’t know anyone who has been stung by a wasp either.  I have been stung by a bee; but that was because I topped a passing weed when walking the dog and a bee happened to be on the plant head.  I can hardly blame the poor creature for having an instinctive reaction to being swept up in a giant hand!  And I can remember looking at the tiny, still pulsating sting lodged in the fleshy part of my hand at the base of my thumb and realizing that the ‘offending’ bee was now one of the flying dead.

     The reaction of people to wasps is one that goes beyond the pain of the sting; for some people the fear of these creatures is visceral and reduces them to gibbering wrecks.  Mind you, I have seen the same reaction to the appearance of a daddy-long-legs – and when has one of those ever managed to pierce the skin of a human!

     My aunt had an allergic reaction to wasp stings.  She was told that if she was stung she should not panic, but go to a hospital immediately – but she was not as neurotic about wasps than those who only had to endure a little local pain if they managed to get it to attack.  Fear of wasps is not logical: yes, there is the possibility of a sting, but you have to work fairly hard to get a wasp to attack.

     The post-swim wasp did come exploring me and had an expeditionary crawl along my hand, and then it flew away.  That has always been my experience; wasps do not really want to expend energy and valuable venom on a creature that is not (usually) going to drop down dead in response.  However, I do not go out of my way to commune with wasps as my experience with the bee shows that even the most placid ‘live and let live’ attitude can be compromised by accident.

     And the last section of the poem asks the question of definition as we usually find that approximation is enough for action.

 

 

 

Pest?

I don’t kill wasps.

Don’t panic-swat with flailing hand,

infuriate with futile squeals.

I let them be.

And watch.

As they traverse the contours of my hands;

short, darting tongues through hairs to flesh

to drink in what I smell of: meat.

The gaudy abdomen, sting tipped

in sunshine’s gleam, is threat,

but why should they, whose prey

is ants and spiders, flies and Coke

take on a landscape smeared with taste?

For me the wasps are visitors:

they stay; they eat; they leave.

And no attack, no pain, just tickle-foraging

through hirsute undergrowth. 

And flight. 

Away.

An aunt of mine

did not kill wasps,

though they could easily

have finished her:

anaphylactic shock

could follow sting –

and death, of course.

But she did not

regard the summer months

as buzzing with mortality.

Discarded ice cream wrappers

and the overflowing bin

were Scylla and Charybdis

on an August stroll, for her,

but she pressed on as if the

sighted, noted, danger was not there;

walked though, and passed unscathed.

Our fear becomes attack:

provokes and redefines.

The wasp has a bad press

(and there’s resentment

at no ‘bee-death’ after sting)

but it’s entitled to defend when it’s ‘attacked’

It’s feared, though adder’s feared more,

and adders do not lurk for human strike,

but they will bite if stepped upon.

And bite and sting are real,

though more in thought

than in lived life.

Pain is always possible,

but weapon’s definition

not offence.

Flight, not fight, the coloured patterns urge,

and gaudiness is warning: go or stay,

your choice,

and was the ‘wasp’ that started

all of this a hoverfly?

My subject matter gets ever more ordinary!  My last poem was centred on nakedness in a public changing room and this present one is about crumbs!
     This too is related to my daily swimming experience, but this time out of the changing room and into the cafe for my obligatory cup of tea.  With the tea (depending on who is making it) I get a couple of those little foil wrapped biscuits that are part of the cup of tea experience.  I tuck one of the biscuits into the side pocket of my sports bag for later use as a base for my home made yogurt, while the other is a treat that I allow myself.  It was the breaking of this little biscuit that prompted the poem.
     I suppose in some ways this is a poem about the writing of a poem, a meta-poem, because while having my cup of tea I try and write something in a small 9 x 14 cm notebook that I have with me at all times.  what I write in this book is usual banal in the extreme, something about the weather or what I am going to do, or more often something I have not done.  But the idea of the writing is to write something, anything, in the hope that a free flow of words might bring something to the surface which can be useful for a poem.  This works sometimes.  Other times, it is just pages of irrelevance.
     For some reason, after the biscuit broke as I was taking it out of its foil wrapper and half the thing bounced on the page on which I was writing, instead of brushing the tiny crumbs away I just looked at them.  Part of me was simply resting after a particularly impressive catch to stop the floorward half of the biscuit from reaching its target, but the other part was thinking about bits and pieces that get caught in the pages of books and are discovered later.  Receipts used as bookmarks, torn pieces of paper, references, comments, newspaper, insects, leaves, photographs, sand, dirt, blood, phone numbers, cloth, ribbon, food, a tiny shell, book marks, money, cards - those are just some of the things that I can remember finding.  There are also the more poignant items when you find something of a parent or a grandparent inside a book that was once theirs.  Or indeed of friends who are still very much alive but far away.
     Whatever the reason for my musing, I decided to leave the crumbs there and wonder if I would ever go back and if I did would I remember leaving them there for me to remember that I left them for that purpose.  So to speak!
     As I say in the poem,
               Should I return,
               as, having written this, I might,
                                        I am conscious that I am deliberately making something out of nothing, but it is also a playing with a concept of memory.
     I am well aware that when I re-visit some of my writing, I read it almost as a stranger - though an oddly prescient one.  Although I cannot directly and precisely relate to all the exact circumstances of the production of each piece of writing, I am certainly strangely in sympathy with the writer!
     I always enjoy experiencing,
               what another me laid down
               for future memory

Crevice crumbs

They’ll stay where pages meet.

Detritus, smaller than a nit.

Memorials to where a biscuit broke,

fell, bounced, but did not hit the floor,

but left some shattered bits to

trail along the notebook’s seam.

Slight specs, like foxing,

on the newly filled-in page.

I turn that page

and run my nail along the crease.

I feel a tiny crunch.

And start another leaf.

This notebook waits for distant eyes

to come back through and glean

the words that have been missed,

that could, perhaps, feed thought anew.

Should I return,

as, having written this, I might,

will I observe small rubble

from a crumbled rusk

and struggle to recall

why it’s still there?

Or turn the pages, losing

what another me laid down

for future memory?

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If you would like to read more of my writing then please visit Cardifftocatalonia.blogspot.com where my daily thoughts are posted.

Riposte

It is sometimes a fact that unremarkable material can, as you dismiss it, leave a nagging stain on your consciousness that you have to write out to get rid of it.

Yet again, it was a Barcelona English Speaking Poetry Group evening that laid the foundations for the following poem.  Sitting here, in front of my computer, I cannot actually remember the stimulus for the evening's writing,  but I know that I emerged from the session with a picture of post-nuclear destruction firmly in my mind.  This did not link with my view of early autumn trees, no matter how hard I try and make these pieces of vegetation particularly my own!  However, the two ideas did intertwine, though I have to admit that was only after quite disparate note making.

I am constantly amazed by how trees take on the appearance of death and then magically come back to life.  I feel this, while knowing that deciduous trees do that as part of their life cycle, but I still find it miraculous when buds appear and everything goes on just at it did the year before.  I can only guess at the horror that greeted the seasons before people had the scientific knowledge to know that things would reappear.

Now, of course, our scientific knowledge indicates that we are working our way towards the non-appearance of leaves, as we destroy the natural sequence of the seasons with the way that we pollute the world.

All of the above were going through my mind as I was writing the following poem.

This poem is not as long as I thought it was going to be, and it is not as graphic as I imagined that it was going to be.  But that 'restraint' is part of the decision which made the poem in the form that you see it here.

There are some parts of this poems which I do not fully understand, though I knew that I wanted to write them.  If that makes sense.

This is the sort of poem to which I will have to return.  But I think that it says something that I truly believe if you look behind the images!

Riposte

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.

The Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan 1678.

Trees begin,

again,

            to fake their deaths.

Each fallen leaf prods pens to gather up

the season’s debris into words.

It is a race between the cleaners

and the lookers-on. 

Who now, will make the most

of transience?

And long before the vegetation has had time

to smear its nourishment

on unappreciative cement

(which islands trees

in the domestic scene)

with chair and tea and time

I watch and nod and drowse.

And then they stop. 

The trees. 

           

            The leaves rise up and

                        re-attach, as every green

veined face is turned in

bland rejection of what was,

and watch,

            impassively,

as humans’ tissue strips away

like leaves

(so tissue-thin it hardens as it drifts)

to brittle-scrape the pavement’s stone.

The second and succeeding suns

flay scuttling people of the world.

Flesh falls.

And gleaming muscle moistens

in the blood-rain air,

as tendons snap the light,

and ligaments suck bone to whiteness

in a gaunt and raw display of

what was once beneath.

And history is only in the ice.

Each band retains the story

that

soft-fleshed betrayers

lost

while luscious leaves rub

fullness in the breeze.

I would appreciate any response which respond to the linking of the title, quotation and poem.  Or indeed any responses about any part of this poem!

Thanks to a throw-away, casual comment from Caroline, the subject of trees has become one which is a feature of my poetry writing!
          As I sit, sipping my post-natation cup of tea, my view is of trees.  I have watched them now since the Autumn, with that attention that comes when you know that you are probably going to be writing about them.  I thought that my observation was acute and I took great pleasure in detailing the changes in the trees through the two seasons that they have been my subject matter.  That, at least was what I thought.
          It turns out that my observation is just as sloppy as anyone else's, and Spring caught me unawares.  It was the beginning of the transformation of the gnarled stumps of the old trees with the first shoots of the season that focussed my attention.
          I have thought that the trees in the cafe of my leisure centre are more than usually, melodramatically gaunt in their winter emptiness.  They could, quite easily be transferred to the stage for some Gothic horror production.  It was a combination of my own lack of perception and the theatricality of the trees that prompted this poem.  The first of the Spring Trees series.

Debut

Each day I looked,

a keen spectator of the scene.

But what is obvious now,

shows me I did not sense

the movement held

within the bulk of trees.

Slow ripples of the yearly rings

that plump the bark and

break the twigs to bud.

Each stunted spike of growth

shows up the tattiness

of last year’s props.

The tired scenery of

dead productions past.

The carcases for odd

forgotten plays. 

                      

                       And now,

with just a touch of green,

re-used and tarted-up

they’re good to go

for yet another show!

Although you might think that I should get a life, I do find watching the trees fascinating!  I am fully determined to keep writing about them and in a year, end up with a sequence which may, or may not work as a separate entity.

          I am trying to get the Autumn Trees poems I wrote, illustrated, or to have art work to accompany them when Flesh Can Be Bright is published in October.  I hope this series or another can inspire further art work.