Dick Westheimer

Insect Apocalypse

I fear my grandkids will not know metaphor,

not know how thoughts can be like fireflies.

They will no longer bound like grasshoppers

or be drawn to danger like a moth to a flame.

They will not understand when Ali boasts

how he floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee,

won’t know honeyed love if they’ve never tasted

a hive’s nectar. And what of that flitting friend.

What will they make of him if all an insect net catches is air.

And music! What will they have to compare to the chord

hummed by a chorus of scarab beetles, or the nuzz

of a cranefly on a summer window screen.

All they will hear will be compared to the survivors,

the churr of greedy harlequin bugs, the merciless

whining of ground hornets, stink bugs tzuzzzzz

and the squish of slugs under their feet.

At least they will have poems found in hard-bound books

written when summer brought swarms of metaphor,

fireflies winked in trees, and children netted

winged flowers, pinned them to cork-boards and grew

to adulthood regretting their tiny childhood crimes.

 

Now I See What’s Kept in the Box in the Back of the Barn

Drawn on the box I see where big bully David and his buddies threw my book bag over the chain link fence. I see the badge Alex Z ripped from my safety patrol belt.  I see tucked below all this the cackling mask of the boy who called me fag in gym class. I see again and again being chosen last. And I see all these things wrapped in a moist towel that snapped against my bare skin in the locker room after swim lessons.

 

Then I pry open the box and see fossilized artifacts from a museum of me.  I turn them in my hand to try to feel how it felt to be that boy. I am like an archeologist attempting to discover the passions of an ancient by studying shards and bones.  All I see is covered in dust and then, beneath it all, I see a rolled up scrap from a scroll written in the hand that looks like mine. This is why, it says, when you shine the brightest, you wont be able to see yourself at all.