Insects

124. 11 November 2021

I remember insects when I was young and silly:

Insects squashed on the windshield of our Ford Zephyr

Until you couldn’t see and had to scrape it all off.

Insects orbiting each other at dusk in the garden

Which I galloped through waving my arms -

Not trying to kill them, just disrupt them.

Daddy-long-legs clacking and clattering in my bedroom.

At first I killed them, then I tried to rescue them.

Mosquito bites all over me on holiday in Suffolk.

Not so many in London, oddly enough.

We had a lot of cabbage whites in our garden;

My father refused to use insecticides there –

And boy, were there a lot of helpful poisons

In the garden centres.

His was a wildflower garden thirty years

Before it became fashionable. Every rock

Hid nations of woodlice, hordes of earwigs.

Roses apart, our neighbours tutted at our weeds.

At night every light had its attendant mob

Of bedazzled desperate dancers and small corpses

In the morning. There was such profusion and bounty

Of insects. Where have they gone?

***

Be my patron — you know it makes sense.