It once had a name –
by dint of those
orange-tipped wings –
and on my tongue’s tip too –
a too-rare flitted hurdler
of garden hedges and fences
No one else cared
Such is our loss of simplicity
that even a vibrating bee’s hum
seems misplaced – mechanical
Our young dog was spell-bound
by a fat black house fly –
I no longer swat them
Their massed die-offs
are merely statistics
fixed by white-suited
pollinators
in huge trucks of profit
who are forever re-filling
their hired-out hives
between pollen buyers
and ramping-up bee prices
Colonies will collapse
under modern diseases –
by man-spread illnesses
and by slicings of trade
Neonicotinoids may kill
the striped-arse armies –
but other – larger forces –
shade their sun-dance ways
A pint on a Monday – at lunchtime?
Things must be bad – Michael –
And so they are – but I only offer lies
above salted crumbs on my table –
small pieces – but shiftable boulders
to summer’s soon-invigorated ants –
able to heft such burdens of others’
relative insignificance – of leftovers –
But that is a season away – along with
beer-swilling wasps and longer days
of enough light to keep me
from the pub and beer on Monday
There was that microcosm
fixing my dawdled childhood
in which I centred myself
in a kneeled-to wondering
as unidentified insects
routed in and out – between
bent blades of variegated grass –
and in that airtight stillness
nervy sparrows let me forage
alongside their skits and hops –
until we were all fed enough
by the microscopic wonders
and then I unhinged
my tight focus – pulled back –
unhooking from nature
as Concorde halved the sky –
that white flechette – fustian –
slapping pigeons from the trees –
it was another sudden brutality
in my sub-sonic childhood
