Robert Feather
This Wasp I’m Trying to Write
We were building the wasp in our many eyes
and words were flying our thoughts between us and
round the round white plastic garden breakfast table,
our eyes bigger than the porcelain plates
and the pancakes saturated in Grade ‘A’ Maple Syrup.
It was a sting suspended and darting between us - our sensitive
morning flesh freshly risen from crisp white cotton sheets.
I brought in the system of black levers and horns
which was demonstrating some second year law of mechanics
by pulling
its front legs across the film of Grade ‘A’ Maple Syrup.
You added the hairs on the legs and the hairs
on the hairs on the legs, the photographs of insect faces
formed of drills and devices, the throbbing thorax, the hoover.
I capped this with an articulated truck and added the African masks
and the God-hand that’d brushed it with a little brain
that anyway was enough for it to perform
its incredible evasions and its uttering style.
We didn’t consider the tyger, the cinnabar moth caterpillar
or the Dennis the Menace T-shirts.
It wasn’t a bee - this was certain.
Whether the wasp was yours or mine, it’s gone
to the apple tree now.
We can pick up our forks and get on with our breakfast.
It’s safely there in the apple tree mining the apples
to perfect rotten lanterns.
Page(s) 7
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