INSECT POEMS

FLIES OF NEW ZEALAND

The four largest orders of the arthropods:

Beetles                                       Coleoptera

Butterflies and moths               Lepidoptera

Ants, bees and wasps                Hymenoptera

Flies                                         Diptera

The name is medical, and mythical too

Something about the nineteenth century, some

Thing about spots on skin. But now, small aerial organisms

That live with us all summer

I find I quite like flies.

Whatever you do don’t look them up

The romance will go

Nobody has much good to say about flies.

The slender lesser house fly with its straight median vein

There’s a lot of them and they’re beautiful in their way.

There is no other fly for me.

WHY WE ARE NOTHING SPECIAL

My codons are your codons grasshopper

The biophysical One, the many Many.

Are you female, by the way?

Outside the Milky Way there can’t be any just like you

But inside, fuck, Andromeda spins for you.

Just like you grasshopper, more special than the Milky Way.

If I’m not good enough is it because I’m human

Even though I share your basic equipment?

Grasshopper why are you a god?

COCKROACH

It’s a bit perhaps like being in a WWII tank

There’s a carapace

 I see out

Others like me surging forward

Different beings come at me

I hear a bit but not much

The big noises

Explosions

Rat ta tat

I see out

Inside my shell I’m soft and perfect in my way

I’m more than me

I’m her and her and him

We’re having a party

Underneath my skin

Inside the Sherman tank

That is my hard plate

I see out

When the others lift off so will I

It’s not a big deal

THE LITTLE BLUE

Waotu Urupā

A grove of ancient tōtara on the top of a small hill in Waotū. Across cornfields, Maungatautari in the distance, Sanctuary Mountain blue grey under a powder blue sky. But the little blue butterfly sticks close to the ground, flying in and out of grass stalks just above the stippled gravestones. Strange to think about her lifecycle, beginning and ending in this urupā, as so many insect lives do. The imago is the last stage in a butterfly’s life, and this field is full of them under the tōtara, above the stones, between the stalks. They jerk, they flutter. The piwakawaka jerk and flutter too like the Little Blues, in and out of visibility, intersecting flight paths across the borderlines between shadow and light. But they are birds, and we’re talking about insects.

Lepidoptera are the glamour pusses of the arthropodia. Slugs, snails and worms, while softly palpable and fashionably slow, don’t feature much in the kinds of conversation ordinary people have. We seem to prefer the avian and mammalian fauna. The Lepidoptera, however, and to a certain extent the Hymenoptera exercise us somewhat. We consider flyways not just in terms of birds these days, and of course the Monarch is king. And queen – you can tell them apart. There is a couple here right now. But this is to accord the Monarch just the kind of attention we don’t want to.

For some there be which have no memorial, even amongst the Lepidoptera. Little Blues, tipuna lost and gone. Ecclesiastes says of these forgotten ones, the small ones who have flown too close to the ground, that they are become as though they had never been born. Is this not the better path? When the tōtara shadows cross the urupā and sink it into night we lift our eyes to the river and far Maungatautari, a mountain merging with the dark. In the last light we see an image of the past right here, at our feet, like that sanctuary on the horizon, like blue butterflies in a blue-grey field.