insects – Page 8 – don't confuse the narrator

plagues & pests

A BBC website headline announces “‘Black Death pit’ unearthed”, and is followed up with a story starting:

Excavations for London’s Crossrail project have unearthed bodies believed to date from the time of the Black Death.

When I read the news, my first thought was of Quatermass and the Pit, so I hope they don’t find any bugs like the one in the photo.

The bug – a langosta in Spanish – has been there for weeks, hibernating discreetly on the bead curtain. At one point there were two of them (hibernating discretely, I suppose).

It looks like a grasshopper to me, but langosta translates as locust, so I guess I should just be glad we don’t have a plague of them.

Which bring us full circle to the Black Death and that burial ground.

fragments

The photo shows what was going on on my verandah once the sun warmed up this morning and brought the wasps out to feed on a small corpse which I assume was left there by the cats.

The villagers here in Spain would call it a langosta, I think. Even with my limited knowledge of the animal world, I do know it’s not a lobster, but I’m not sure if it was actually a locust, a cricket, a grasshopper or a katydid. Whatever it was, though:
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write, write and write again

Having acquired new book cases, I have been sorting out some of the many piles of paper that I have in my studio; while doing so, I came across two versions of a poem laboriously written out for a competition back when I was a child.

The earlier version is just six lines long and starts:

The Spider, first line: It's horrible and ugly and I hate it.

gossamer thoughts

There have been a few news pieces recently about the world’s largest spider’s webs. There was one back in September, where the web in question – found in Madagascar – seems to be that of an individual spider and is the circular ‘doily’ type.

Then there was the huge sheet-like web found in Texas recently, that is more likely the work of many spiders.

I have no idea how many spiders there are down in my laundry room, but they have been busy, as is clear from the photo (which really doesn’t do justice to the sun sparkling on the dust motes caught in the filigree of the web).
Continue reading “gossamer thoughts”

incubus

He comes to her at dawn,
sweet-nothings her awake
as he nuzzles past her ear,
whispering his desire, telling
how her sweat draws him, how
he would risk his life to serenade her,
to tangle through her hair and kiss
the smooth curve of her neck.

I’m not exactly bubbling over with new ideas at the moment, so I’m looking back over old notebooks and reviewing pieces that I never thought sufficiently polished to submit for comment and critique, let alone for publication. So this is still a draft, but it amuses me, as does the idea of writing a poem to a mosquito. Of course, if you’ve interpreted it as meaning something different, that’s your prerogative as reader.