Poetry Thursday

This week's Poetry Thursday assignment was to carry a poem around with you and write about how that act affected you. Well that didn't work for me since I was carrying a poem, or more precisely a concept for a poem and working on the poem. The concept came about Thursday last week when I was in my back yard taking pictures and looking at all the insects that were mating or eating to get fat enough to mate and I started thinking that in the popular mind, spring is the time for reproduction and rebirth.

But for many species, late summer and fall is that time. Many aquatic invertebrates which had indulged in asexual reproduction during the summer, now switch to sexual reproduction. Cicadas have emerged and are frantically seeking mates; the grasshoppers are coupling everywhere. Indeed I think John Ashcroft, who is remembered for covering breasts on statues with cloth, would probably throw a huge tarp over my garden to protect young minds from thoughts of what those grasshoppers are doing. And they are not even using the missionary position. The plants...Oh the plants! This is the time for some of the best bees in Kansas to come out and strut their stuff among the plants...But I won't go there.



The poem finally fell into place over the weekend when we had approximately seven inches of rain and the Datura (Nightshade) pictured here ( their "white slips" showing) remained open during the day. So here is the result:

Late Summer Rains

Late summer comes in a rush
Of cicadas buzzing the air.
Monarch larvae fatten
On mother aphid laden leaves
Of seed spilling Asclepias
And grasshoppers leisurely couple
In armored fetish wear
While wee worms French kiss
In the soil and the pond.
Oh and the pond with its animalcules
Commingling their DNA
And playing craps with time-
The pond opens itself
To receive the pulses of rain
Which surprise the world with fervor
And the night working flowers
Caught unaware of the time
Show their white slips
In the day.

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