Into thin air: Carol Ann Duffy presents poems about our vanishing insect world | Poetry

The Human Bee by Carol Ann Duffy

I became a human bee at twelve,
when they gave me my small wand,
my flask of pollen,
and I walked with the other bees
out to the orchards.

I worked first in apples,
                                  climbed the ladder
into the childless arms of a tree
and busied myself, dipping and tickling.
duping and tackling, tracing
the petal’s guidelines
down to the stigma.
                             Human, humming,
I knew my lessons by heart:
the ovary would become the fruit,
the ovule the seed,
fertilised by my golden touch,
my Midas touch.

I moved to lemons,
                            head and shoulders
lost in blossom; dawn till dusk,
my delicate blessing.
All must be docile, kind, unfraught
for one fruit –
                 pomegranate, lychee,
nectarine, peach, the rhymeless orange.
And if an opening bud
                                  was out of range,
I’d jump from my ladder onto a branch
and reach.

So that was my working life as a bee,
till my eyesight blurred,
my hand was a trembling bird
                                             in the leaves,
the bones of my fingers thinner than wands.
And when they retired me,
I had my wine from the silent vines,
and I’d known love,
and I’d saved some money –

but I could not fly and I made no honey.

ladybird by Andrew McMillan

first it was the magic porridge pot
absent from the colony of books
when I’d gone home     back to my bedroom
hungry for what I missed of my childhood

weeks later     the enormous turnip
and then the three billy goats gruff
cantered off      and no-one noticed
the small black swarm of letters that hung
                                        in the air like dust     and then were gone

at first people seemed to remember
the stories     but then they started
forgetting      how big had the turnip been?
had there really been a turnip?

and then there was no turnip     no goats
in the field      and all the shelves were empty
and all the streets silent

*

when I was a boy      mum placed in my hand
a ladybird that contained an entire
treasure island     now     back at my house
one page flaps at the back of the bookcase

I hold it     its simple intricacy
its worlds within worlds     as it stops moving
and dissolves to tissue     and becomes
a ghost of itself     in my small hands 

Moths & Butterflies by Michael Longley

I want to talk to dead children
About moths and butterflies,
The Peacock’s eyespots, two
Then four, beauty and terror;
Six Spot Burnet’s warning
Black and red (hydrogen
Cyanide); the female
Winter moth that cannot fly;
And one with no proboscis
That cannot feed, a ghetto moth;
Caterpillars that gobble
Stinging nettles and ragwort;
Nightmares of the chrysalis.

In September forty-four
Hanuš Hachenburg writes
Somewhere, far away out there,
Childhood sweetly sleeps
Along that path among the trees;
Listen to Pavel Friedmann
I never saw another
Butterfly, that butterfly
Was the last one, butterflies
Don’t live in the ghetto;
I want to talk to dead children,
The children of Terezín,
About moths and butterflies.

The Host by Imtiaz Dharker

While I have been away the fruit flies
have moved in with their extended family
and rise politely off a feast of black
banana skin to welcome me home. I swat
and slap, but they just laugh on the updraft
of my flapping, batting hands.

The banana gone, I open a window,
hoping they will make off to some other repast
but they post a halo round my head,
two hundred wingbeats to a second, hatched
with a brain far quicker than mine. At my desk,
I am possessed, follow the threads for evidence

of pestilence, the death of civilisations
by Zebub, Arob, all the dust of Egypt
turned to gnats that torment livestock, squat
on ruined crop, rotted fish and frog.
In the face of this invasion, I am
an avenger sent to stop a plague,

enter Kill Fruit Flies, study the traps, fill
a glass jar with cider vinegar, stir in sugar,
cover with cunning cling-film, pierce and wait,
and they come, hover like decorous guests
at a table, perch on the rim. I watch them drown
one by one, then return to my desk. But just

as I begin to write, one rises up at the edge
of my sight like the helicopter in North
by Northwest. I spin back into battle, set
the trap again, more delicious, more sugar, more
stealth. It sits on the lip, licks at the cling-film,
sips. I strike. It dies a vinegar death.

Through the rest of the day I revisit the site.
No sign of return. The next morning no-one
is there, the jar untouched, my table bare
in the desolate kitchen. I try to work but keep
coming back to stand like an expectant host
waiting to welcome the guest I miss. 

To a Lady, viewed by a Head-Louse by Denise Riley

I with my triumphant bites
Vex useless human parasites.
You world-devourers are for – what?
“Useful” you yourselves are not.
Refer me, lady, to your Gaia –
My jaws will raise your blush of fire.
When humans pause to think of me
It makes their skin crawl eerily:
“Delusional parasitosis”: infestation
Of purely phantom nits’ gestation.
It’s my sole work to multiply –
The task of ladies to ask “Why
Should such a pointless breed exist?”
Only the entomologist
Admits my “good-for-nothing” species
To own the interest of its faeces
For those can raise allergic wheals
Then mortified parental squeals
Or groans of mums or dads who find
Their darlings’ hair home to my kind,
Each louse egg’s tight-cemented pearl
Superglued to their shampooed girl.
I’ll plant rosettes of telltale red
High on her neck, low on her head
Until your steel rake catches me
Or unguents loose their fatal sea.
Fleas acquire some charming tropes
For amorous fluid-mingling hopes;
Lice? Condemned to Owen’s trench
By reportage of mud-blood stench.
Some sorts are meals for grooming birds
While others have engendered words
Like “lousy”, apt for human speech –
Each head-louse purely is for each.
My species’ world obeys no brief
Of reciprocity – such a relief
Not to claim virtue. Ah, your “rich
Biodiversity”! Makes you itch.
I am for nothing – only to increase
My number, swelling after my decease.
“Purposeless” insects may prove good
For thwarting your delusion that all should
Conform to human dreams of mutual aid –
Presumptuous fantasy we lice downgrade.
Lady, I’d answer Robbie Burns:
Let other species take their turns
And do not keep so dour and mean
Vaunting your old Anthropocene. 

Inners by Zaffar Kunial

Six Riddles

Green petitioner –
limbs up, at the twelfth-hour – in
hope of prey. Our prayer.

            —

Forktailed in ear-
thy colours, in earthy bark – in
dark places I hear.

            —

Behind life, death’s sting –
that barbed thorn, torn, ripped from your
end – beyond being.

            —

Longshanks. Bad copter.
You fly like you carry land.
Daddy, you falter.

            —

Moonlit dust, gather
with each mote, death’s weight – take wing
Make off, small mother.

            —

Summer bird – mute, thin –
heaven’s hinge-clip. Flip-flopper.
Stemless flower. Soul thing.

Thinnings

            —

Holly Blue … margin
haunter – through life’s sharp hedge – thin
blue flame keeps going.

            —

Clouded Yellow – blur
in the laburnum – old thin
light I remember.

            —

You belong between
Pale Mottled Willow – whether
this world, or that one.

            —

Blotched Emerald – there,
past the hospital curtain,
far off, off kilter. 

            —

Your mark wasn’t thin –
Purple Hairstreak, oak lover –
but wide. Dark lightning.

            —

Green Hairstreak hovers –
Mum waves a gift, found again –
my four-leaf clover.

            —

Ghost Swift – underwings,
flash your white, underwrite our
long disappearing.

            —

O Dingy Skipper
wobbly captain, sailing
oakbrown and sombre.

            —

… nettles, willow, elm,
… in hops, on rocks, walls, Comma,
don’t stop, carry on

            —

Through sleeves of thin air,
you appear, bright magician –
here gone – Small Copper.

            —

Soul, Purple Emperor –
shy dash through oak crowns – cut in
to their green weather.

—  —  —  —  —  — —  — — — — —    

So ‘cut into’ – in-
sect – this cutting loss. Mine. Yours.
This small world, thinning.

Clegs and Midges by Paul Muldoon

1

The fact that Socrates is represented by Aristophanes
as a gadfly tormenting the body politic in some
   political horse-barn or byre
only stiffens 

my resolve to raise the bar
back at the milking parlor. Taking their name from
    the Viking
term for a “burr,”

clegs have a way of spiking
a story whilst splashing it all over the front page.
I’ll be damned if I’ll let them come within striking

distance of my home patch.
   The green of the cesspool is the green of ceremonial
grade matcha.
Having made a botch

of my exposed forearms, the clegs now mooch
about the hindquarters of a heifer.
The bullock that had long since seemed to have lost
   his mojo 

takes off across the water meadow like a zephyr.
Since I am no longer wont
to be targeted as Chilon the Ephor

was targeted by his fellow Spartans, when it comes
   to sustaining wounds
the clegs and I are pretty much even-steven.
The midges, in the meantime, have thrown caution
   to the winds. 

2

The fact that Christ himself would seem to have
   suffered not only the ordeal
of a cleg in the side but a midge-coronet
is enough to rattle

the best of us. The purple of Jesus’s robe is so
   ingrained
I may find it difficult to commit, in my new version,
   to Matthew’s “scarlet.”
I should be able to organize a workaround

in the matter of paying off the “harlot.”
There’ll be no stopping the presses. That’s one of
   the translator’s perks.
I’ll be damned if I’ll allow those varlets

to confine me to barracks
like the monk who offered me matcha in the
   Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto.
The description of Saint Paul “kicking against the
   pricks”

I’ve chosen to render as “kicking against the goads”
so as not to offend any shrinking violets
among the money-lenders. I’m not going to dress
    up “a den of iniquity,” 

though, when it comes to the playing of skin flutes.
I’m happy to go with the flow
particularly if the story stays below the fold,

given how a warble-fly
in the ointment is sometimes perceived by the hoi
   polloi as a major hurdle,
as if it represents some kind of character flaw.

3

The fact that a rabble tends to rouse the rabble
is no less true of our raised bogs
than the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It’s only
   another ripple that sends the ripple

across a stagnant ring over which the midges box
so clever. My horse tugs at her halter
as if they’ve set their beaks

at her rather than me. Even the monk illuminating
   my version of the Psalter
views this world in terms of the column inch.
I’ll be damned, too, if I’ll falter 

before the invisible. If the idea of a garden where
   everything seems to hinge
on one of its fifteen boulders
always being hidden from view sends a shiver
through my palfrey’s haunch,

it also makes my own unease look paltry.
It’s true, of course, that Saint Patrick’s claim to have
   herded swine on Slemish
connects him to Saint Anthony, another consensus-
   builder, 

but the recent implanting of a microchip containing
   the entire Rhemish
Testament under the skin of my mare
confirms I’d not let a blemish

even slightly mar
my ambition. Incorporate, I always say, as a monk
    incorporates the hole of a warble
on a sheet of vellum into the phrase “less is m( )re.” 

Brimstone Moth (viewed under a Microscope) by Sean Borodale

I see in the mirror of what saw me –
    a microbiology
siphoned off
    from the light of the sun.

Quixotic kinetics.
Quiver of leaf over rotten shade.

Under magnification you become
   snipped up harp.
Pieces swerved into the prismatic.
   A magnetic, maniac,
detail turbulent with attention.

All touch is mistake;

a breathed, stirred presence
through the cohesive wilds of your hair;
    your ordinary,
magnified shreds of infidel.

Where is our commune?

Re-focus, stare at your thorax;
search the bedraggled, yellowed grass;
where the coin of last night’s
   moon was drowned.

A hole at the heart-place,
round and cold as the disc of a fish-eye.

Who was it left you, like a fairy
leaves money, from another world? 

Still Life by Mark Pajak

In the fruit
on gran’s bedside table,
under the translucent skin
of a grape,
the black pips
at the core
seem to be crawling.

What’s going on
inside the greenlit gum
of its flesh
are six ants:
the whiskers
of their legs,
their small
plectrum heads
and snipping mouths.

Soon all the fruit bowl
will be moving.
Already
an apple’s breast
has a visible pulse.
A once-dense peach
is deflating.

And what can she do
but stare
from her hospital bed;
seeming all the stiller
for her slow
pink eyelids,
those quick
teaspoon
breaths.

Imagines by Yvonne Reddick

That garden of émigrés and locals: sacred
fig, date palm. I was sent to clip the shockhead
lemon tree, and dropped the shears when I saw
I’d perpetrated murder: an inch-worm, halved.
                 Chubby infant pythons, its four siblings
cowered under leaves. My sister and I salvaged them,
provisioned them with lime-twig offcuts, camouflaged
from sparrows and the boys who dismembered
soldier-ants in Science.
                 Seven years since the swarm of Nighthawks
ripped the sound-barrier, each bearing its high-
explosive clutch, zeroing on Baghdad. Shots
imaged the troops, mantis-eyed in gas-masks.
                 They shredded leaves to veins for a fortnight
then inverted their skins, like the werewolves
painted in my book of Grimms’ tales. Armoured
chrysalids folded their flight.
                 North of the border, the local despot unleashed
nerve-gas trialled on insects. Birds plummeted from
nests, dogs choked on bloody foam; finally,
people hacked up their lungs. That memory
raw behind the eyelids. When the Tornados
flew overhead, their sonic boom detonated my sister’s
night-terrors: bombs razing our house.
                 We watched their eclosion – damp wing-rags
unscrolling like hibiscus petals, the oil-sheen
shot with lemon. I couldn’t say if their checked
dappling was the likeness of a silk prayer-rug, or
a stained-glass icon. Four chequered swallowtails,
flexing their mirrored wings. We watched them
flicker through our classroom door, into the flowering
season. The ripeness inconceivable without them. 

Stevie Smith Is Still Ear by Daljit Nagra

        not waving but swatting
                     a gnat by the Mimram
                                  when the kickback cometh
        from the dead gnat’s dad
                     swinging me centrifugally
                                    by the e
                                                 a
                                                 r
through me Yellow Paper all the way to Yeovil
              and onward atomising through the
                           higgledy-piggledy
yet still ear if you get my drift
                     cos the gnat dad
                  from wherever I land
                                keeps swinging what’s left of me
                                                     by the ear.
                                             how was I to know
                                               gnats don’t nip?
                                just now       did you ear
                               the swatted gnat-son hum

I couldn’t slip her the prophecy dad
she slap me down afore I was done
now I’m waxed in her ear say, see? 

Love Poem, Lampyridae (Glowworms) by Fiona Benson

The female born again with little changed
except she has no mouth and may not eat,
except she has this urge to climb, and a light
she must raise and twist; the male born again
with little changed except he has no mouth,
except he has this urge to search, and wings –
oh she must twist and turn her tail’s green fire
like bait, its little stab of brightness in the night,
and he must search with wings through
    troubled air
to find her pinhole lure, its single, green,
seducing star .... All night she signals him in:
come find me – it is time – and almost dawn;
all night he looks for her in petrol stations
villages and homesteads, the city’s neon signs:
where are you – it is time – and almost dawn....
Once were humans wandered in the lanes,
led astray by fairies, foxfire, who found
their stranger selves and brought them home.
Now the dark is drowned, but some things
you can only find beyond the light,
and it is time and almost dawn and love,
my love, there is no finding then.

Moth by Alice Oswald

Sometimes when you step outside
you hear a gasp
              a sharp intake of rooks
              being quickly deflated into trees

so that your arm un-hinges and your shoulders tilt their fans and almost
        shrug you to the woods
and then a sigh

        it would be good you think
        it would be good to sleep on the sycamore’s top floor

but then again there are hedges and night-scented road-edges and if I know my own
        stumbling hovering   head-heavy body
then I could sneak along there flying by misgivings

and leaf by leaf by constantly   tripping up
and falling flat and juddering forwards
   at last I might be given back my markings

and in a moth’s life   in the ditch’s low level sky
by the glow of a flower in the clothes of a messenger
maybe this wish
                 whatever it is
                                     will simplify 

A Swallowtail at Turf Fen by Matthew Hollis

When rain-work ends, at Ranworth or Hickling
or Strumpshaw Fen, wherever there is milk-parsley,
wherever there is teasel and ragged robin,
you may see one:
                                     its forewing
shocked in lemon–coal, its hindwing
tapered as a develin’s tail, fretted with bloodspot
and cobalt.
                         More likely you may not,
so finical in turnout no expert can ensure it;
far less a boy who grew up counting not butterfly
but coypu, the shy hump on the waterline, a nest
of sedge and shorter sallow; who learned at night
the weirdish cries, something like the sound I thought
a soul, departing, made.
                                               But no sight
of a swallowtail; just mardlers’ talk of easterlies
that one year swept a brood inland and shook it out
in Cambridgeshire –
                                         confetti on far weather
         that children cycled after,
their hands high off their handlebars.
                                                                       All day
we worked our numb boat in and out of mooring,
faking down the bow-rope time again.
                                                                       Evening,
the light diminishing, our likelihood at low,
we fetched up at How Hill, and wondered at the worth
of going on. We trust to see the other
not see ourselves alone.
                                            And turning to the boat for home,
it came at height
                                 from the marshman’s hut,
peddling and wheeling
                                            to the buddleia –
fending at damsels, at dragons, coppers,
then rising in the fore-wind over Barton,
                                                                             leaving us
rooted but renewed,
                                         all doubt dispelled,
like vow-broken Psyche,
                                               lamp raised and heart-sworn,
mortal as her miracle takes flight.

Mantis by Ella Duffy

She stills herself,
a green meditation,
angled with desire
for aphid, moth.

Icon, on guard,
she is threat posed
as prophet. A body
of tricks, mischief

made leaf, flowering
to thorn; a small
violence. Trauma
is feast.

Mantis, wild queen,
her face is geometry
at play; a compass
for the dead. 

Mercy by Martha Sprackland

Night after night I must gather
tens of insects – millipedes,
stinkbugs, houseflies, moths –
and expel them. At breakfast the others
share their methods, some pressing the bugs
under the thumb until they give and smear,
their legs coming apart like dry grass,
or mashing them with a book, a glass,
the heel of a shoe. The walls are
   remembered
with all the little deaths. I had been
   trapping them
between a postcard and a cup
and ferrying them laboriously downstairs
to the outside door and flicking them into
   the pine-litter
to crawl back up the wall and through the
   screen
into my bedroom for another round.
But this morning, in a fury
I caught the shield-shaped thing in my
   bare hand,
its legs gyrating feebly against my fingers
and ran to the bathroom, where I threw it
   into the toilet.
It turned small circles,
swimming an irregular stroke
in desperate search of landfall. I watched
like the eye of a lightning god, unforgiving
as it groped at the smooth blank sides.
Only after some too-long stretch of time
did I press the flush and whirl it
benevolently down into the tank.
The last of summer is leaving. Soon
the insects will all be sleeping in the walls.
If you would just call, or write to me.