Getting to be fall

The wasps are dying after the rush
Mad to fill nest with prey and eggs.
They lie curled on the bricks
Embraced by death and drying in the sun.
Black and white they terrorized deans
and students around the door by Strong Hall.
People complained; wasps were sprayed
Impatiently for them to die.
But the wasps frayed wings said
Death was coming anyway.
And as for fear of stings,
I have only known one person
To be stung and that be me
Reaching into a net, my hand
Closing over the wasp and getting
One quick jab of summer.
Then the pain was gone,
The wasp free to die, her young feeding
On cicadas, asleep from their stings,
Her young slowly turning
Into next summer.

Commentary-the poem came to me the other day when I found a dead cicada killer on the side walk at my campus. For some reason I just thought.."hmmmm getting to be fall" and the rest fell into place. Cicada killers are big wasps that dig burrows, hunt and sting a cicada, stuff it into the burrow and lay , I believe, one egg on the paralyzed cicada. Next summer the young wasps emerge.

These are big wasps maybe a third longer than the image as it probably appears online and people really do get terrorized by them. But the wasp is merely intent on hunting and they do not sting unless you do something stupid as I did.

Unlike honey bees, the sting and associated gland does not pull out so when they sting a person, the pain is intense but brief. In fact the pain is a lot less than either a honey bee sting or a hornet sting- a lot less.

Secular poem

The garden in June is falling over
Itself in green, first flush of blooms deadheaded.
Vinca, leathered hand, the lily smothers.
Daisy flea bane riots among peonies spent.
Sphingid larvae frass honeysuckle leaves,
While gold ants slurp juices from a worm dead
On the brick path where sedums overflow.
Wasps hunt prey and drink flower whoopie
And along the border sweat bees work the lilies
For nectar, pollen sticking to hummers
Who flee my leisured steps like Disney pixies.
I walk along the garden's edge and stoop
To see another small and unexpected thing
In my late spring garden birthing summer.





Comment: this is kind of a sonnet though in free rhyme. The thought that started the poem is that there is so much to do in the garden what with all the rain we have here in Kansas. But really a lot the garden does for itself though we don't always like the results. The larva pictured is really feeding on honeysuckle and at first I didn't make the connection between the larvae and the adult moth shown here also photographed in my garden.



The word "frass" is usually a noun meaning debris and excrement left by insects. Normally I don't like the tendency to turn nouns into verbs but sometimes it works for me. The word is probably related to the German verb fressen-to feed. Animals fressen, people essen as I recall from my German. Of course my wife thinks I fressen way too often.

There is also a related word in terms of meaning-"orts" scraps of food left over from insect feeding. So in ecology and entomology we often talk about "frass and orts".