Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘One thing we can be sure of
About God
Is that he loves beetles.’
So said a sober biologist
(Some biologists are sometimes sober)
Referring to the whopping truth
That of Earth’s multifarious fauna
More answer to the name of insect
And of these, most are beetles.

Which makes an awful lot of beetles...

Happily doing their creepy-crawly thing
Burrowing, chewing, digesting, excreting
Fighting, mating, laying, hatching
- Whilst we gross humans,
God’s trivial-numbered
Soft-fleshed afterthought,
Presume to lord it over them.

Franz Kafka had a nightmare
Thought he’d become a beetle
But that was pure hubris -
Poor chap didn’t realise what he was claiming.
We are called upon to fulfil
A far humbler role.

Fact is
There’s something so right about a beetle
So compact, so shiny
So water repellent
So insect-for-all-seasons
(Made a good car design, too)
Compared with, let us say, crane-flies
Febrile, twitchy things with spindly appendages
Dangling, trembling, all over the place
Hanging off in all directions
Like an overloaded warplane
Designed by a committee
Of non-sober biologists.

Not so God’s beetles.
Form equals function
Streamlined elegance
(The Bauhaus would have been thrilled
To come up with something this good)
Plus a few special tricks built-in
Double-Oh-Seven fashion
Under that glossy carapace.

I watched these little charmers
In Ditchling duck pond
Three millimetres long, tight-packed with vivid life
Darting like black quicksilver below the surface
On essential beetle errands
Then rising to breathe
In a silvery dimple
For a split-second only
Before sounding green depths again.

While I observed, one surfaced
And in a trice had unfurled fairy wings
To brave the wild blue yonder
Soaring away
Bee-line bidding
For beetle Heaven.

Soon others bombed in
Crash-landing out of the blue
Pancaking prettily
Wings tucked tout-de-suite
And in an instant were submarine
Almost too quick for the eye to follow.

We live more slowly - elephantine, ponderous
And when it comes down to it
The thing we mostly do to beetles
Is tread on them
- Without really meaning to
Of course.

So that’s the role of humans
In the Grand Scheme of Things?
To act as casual executioners
Weeding out beetle populations
On a random basis.
Blatt! ...Scrunch!

Descending with massive aplomb
Flat-footed in killer boots
To extinguish another precious life
Terminating another small perfection
Among God’s chosen ones.