Remembering insects. Some call them pests. This poem calls them sorely missed.

::::::::

No, I mean Insects.

They were everywhere,

like little alien life-forms right outside the door.

Walking Sticks were the largest

and they really looked like long sticks walking.

Has anyone seen one lately?

Caterpillars, colorful, furry, prickly,

barbed, horned, striped and spotted.

Daddy Long Legs -- everywhere.

There were bees in flowering bushes

humming like transformers,

and they were all wild,

making honey somewhere,

so many,

I still associate the smell of certain flowers

with that electric sound of bees.

Sure I got stung, a lot,

but it never killed me.

Getting stung was just a fact of life

on a summer's day.

And there were Writing Spiders,

literally hundreds in the field.

(Oh yeah, there were fields.)

And all kinds of jewel-encrusted dragonflies

zipping through the air.

And ants, black, red, yellow and flying,

hard-working, good citizens

of their realm.

Oh and moths,

made out of powder, or so I thought,

because every time I caught one

and held it in the round container of my hands

it would leave a smudge of powder,

white, pink or bluish-gray.

I used to go to sleep to a symphony of insects.

They tuned up as the sun was setting.

The sound was orchestral in scope

increasing and deepening

until it felt like I was being rocked to sleep

by waves of sound.

Where did they all go?

Some people call them pests.

But oh, how I cherish those memories

of being rocked to sleep

by the music of pests.

(Article changed on July 31, 2017 at 03:01)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.