Insect Poetry Quotes

Words Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face. Yet often they fail me. I have so much I want to say, so many stories, images, proverbs, etc. But the words aren't good enough, the wrong ones kiss me. Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren. But I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.

Sleeping In The Forest I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations—there you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science.

If I were a flower, humming bird would be my favourite bee And If I were blind, the light of darkness I'd love to see

It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric. The music sounded better than anything I'd ever heard. I had never been so happy in my life. I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest. I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.

Done with the whole dark & the insect dirge under blue lit lamps. Done trying to remember June, first stars & August when I was Penelope when I was Eurydice when July was missing & I was my own dull shade.

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic... upon the strata of the Earth!

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. p.116

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far: the rune; the chant; the incantation; the spell; the kenning; sacred words; forbidden words; the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted on vellum, or traced in sand.

Et puis le beau rayon s'arrêtait à la surface du fleuve, s'y réfléchissait, jouait un instant, sur des nénufars blancs, des campanules bleues, asiles parfumés et flottants d'une myriade d'insectes dont les corselets diaprés chatoyaient comme autant de rubis et d'émeraudes. Enfin il s'éteignait comme à regret, le beau rayon, en laissant sur la surface du fleuve une éblouissante auréole qui contrastait avec les ombres vertes et transparentes, projetées par l'épaisseur des arbres de la rive.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

My Name Once when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass, feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become and where I would find myself, and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go.

You were a town with one pay phone and someone else was using it. You were an ATM temporarily unable to dispense cash. You were an outdated link and the server was down. You were invisible to the naked eye. You were the two insect parts per million allowed in peanut butter. You were a car wash that me as dirty as when I pulled in. You were twenty rotting bags of rice in the hold of a cargo plane sitting on the runway in a drought-riddled country. You were one job opening for two hundred applicants and you paid minimum wage. You were grateful for my submission but you just couldn't use it. You weren't a Preferred Provider. You weren't giving any refunds. You weren't available for comment. Your grave wasn't marked so I wandered the cementary for hours, part of the grass, part of the crumbling stones.

After Your Death First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left empty the jars you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem, I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or—like another I plucked and split open—being taken from the inside: a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

Love is like a white geranium. It grows like a weed overpowering the ground– if you don’t take care of it prune it shape it it climbs walls and hides insects that slowly eat at it making it die. Easily grown and easily withered.

Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.

Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred." The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.

Death is like the insect Menacing the tree, Competent to kill it, But decoyed may be. Bait it with the balsam, Seek it with the knife, Baffle, if it cost you Everything in life. Then, if it have burrowed Out of reach of skill, Ring the tree and leave it, — ’Tis the vermin’s will.

Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others are burned in the flames. Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. After all those millennia of poetry about the moon, nothing was more prosaic than the guys in space suits stomping around on the moon with their flags and golf clubs thirty-something years ago. The moon is profound except when we land on it. Paradise

Sometimes I grow afraid of long flights and street signs and a heartbeat Of open endings and reflections and chipped coffee mugs Of jingling keys and unmade beds and choked sobs Of crescent moons and dead flowers and small insects But most of all I am afraid //Of you// -An abusive relationship

This wobbly world host to insects and lint and a thousand pithy ways to feel unserious each minute It brings about a great softening of the mind, like the clouded edges of sea glass (this filter you could download and apply) A poultice or an opiate, rigidly individual. Alone and erasing sentences to splinters. (Poem No. 5)

Don’t read books! Don’t chant poems! When you read books your eyeballs wither away leaving the bare sockets. When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowly with each word. People say reading books is enjoyable. People say chanting poems is fun. But if your lips constantly make a sound like an insect chirping in autumn, you will only turn into a haggard old man. And even if you don’t turn into a haggard old man, it’s annoying for others to have to hear you. It’s so much better to close your eyes, sit in your study, lower the curtains, sweep the floor, burn incense. It’s beautiful to listen to the wind, listen to the rain, take a walk when you feel energetic, and when you’re tired go to sleep.

Ninja beats pirate. Pirate beats ghost. Ghost beats zombie. Zombie beats most. Werewolf beats vampire. Vamp beats Imp. Imp beats fiend. Fiend beats wimp. Wizard beats cyrborg. Cyborg surely beats troll. Troll beats goblin. Goblin eats a hermit’s soul. Hermit beats child. Child beats wagon. Wagon beats moon snake. Moon snake beats dragon. Dragon beats hydra. Hydra beats sailor. Sailor beats teacher. Teacher beats tailor. Tailor beats sun worm. Sun worm beats clown. Clown beats robo-squid. Robo-squid beats town. Town fights jackals. Town will win. Town fights mummies. Town won’t fight again. Zookeeper beats hell hound. Hell hound beats giant. Giant beats accountant. Accountant beats client. Client beats frog. Frog beats himself. Knight beats Big Foot. Big Foot beats elf. Elf beats pixie. Pixie beats specter. Specter beats sea hag. Sea hag beats Hector. Hector beats serpent. Serpent beats rat. Rat beats Grandma. Grandma beats cat. Lava beats demon. Demon beats warlock. Warlock beats dinosaur. Dino beats Spock. Spock beats Lando. Lando beats Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon beats Jar-Jar. Jar-Jar beats none. Rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper. Paper beats insect. Insect beats vapor. Wood Woman beats Tree Man. Tree Man beats the dark. The dark kills spider-fish. Spider-fish beats shark. You beat me. I beat a dentist. The dentist beats the barber. The barber is menaced. These are the rules, and never forget. Now hand over your money and place your bet.

Once a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair, and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair; but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread, sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head; and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame, and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame. Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants, and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance! And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint, and apostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print. And it's thus with worldly troubles; when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts.

Darwin, landing in Brazil in 1832, had a similar reaction, colored by his reading of his predecessor." Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred." The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold.

Nature is the mother of all, All seasons are under her feet, Autumn chases spring or spring chases autumn; only she knows, Sun chases moon or moon chases sun; only she knows, Life chases death or death chases life; only she knows, How wind flows like a lightless stream; only she knows, How men chases women or women chases men; only she knows, We stay in nature or nature stays in us; only she knows, From seed to tree, from lake to ocean, From mountain to birds, birds to animals, From flowers to insect, and insects again to birds, Who created this; only she knows, We are incomplete without her or she is incomplete without us; no one knows.

My soul is no different from a Lotus flower. I didn’t start my journey in fresh water because my environment was not pleasant. Just like a Lotus flower, my life was surrounded by insects, debris, and so many unpleasant things and people. However, just like the Lotus petals are never contaminated by the murky water, my core remained pure. Just like the Lotus flower, I came from a place of suffering. However, I remained true to myself. I have overcome many obstacles in my life. I am proud of myself—because this time, I jumped a little higher over the hurdles. I have finished the never-ending race. I have officially crossed the finish line and have a fresh start! I am renewed, and I am loved!

In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.

A venerable Japanese proverb declares, “The silkworm-moth eyebrow of a woman is the axe that cuts down the wisdom of man.” Likewise, the oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Odes, features an entomological tribute to a noblewoman’s face: “Her forehead cicada-like / her eyebrows like [the antennae of] the silkworm moth / What dimples, as she artfully smiled!” Throughout China’s imperial history, the attraction of a woman’s éméi (蛾眉)—her “moth-feeler eyebrows”—was a persistent theme.

Sirius Sojourn by Stewart Stafford Cottage in an aromatic meadow, Summer's languid haze hanging, The old windmill's sundial stilled, Chirping birds and insect drones. Flowing brooks at a funereal pace, A bloated lull duels exiguous energy, Thick air's blanketing somnolence, Liquid refreshment soothes inertia. Salmon sundown slithers to a siesta, In a clear purple sky nodding assent, The intense day imperceptibly eased, As the night's humid embrace begins. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

ants - the pious insect, Randolph called them: they fill me with oh so much admiration and ah oh so much gloom: such puritan spirit in their mindless march of Godly industry, but can so anti-individual a government admit the poetry of what is past understanding? Certainly the man who refused to carry his crumb would find assassins on his trail, and doom in every smile. As for me, I prefer the solitary mole: he is no rose dependent upon thorn and root, nor ant whose time of being is organized by the analterable herd: sightless, he goes his separate way, knowing truth and freedom are attitudes of the spirit.

There is a flower that Bees prefer — And Butterflies — desire — To gain the Purple Democrat The Humming Bird — aspire — And Whatsoever Insect pass — A Honey bear away Proportioned to his several dearth And her — capacity — Her face be rounder than the Moon And ruddier than the Gown Of Orchis in the Pasture — Or Rhododendron — worn — She doth not wait for June — Before the World be Green — Her sturdy little Countenance Against the Wind — be seen — Contending with the Grass — Near Kinsman to Herself — For Privilege of Sod and Sun — Sweet Litigants for Life — And when the Hills be full — And newer fashions blow — Doth not retract a single spice For pang of jealousy — Her Public — be the Noon — Her Providence — the Sun — Her Progress — by the Bee — proclaimed — In sovereign — Swerveless Tune — The Bravest — of the Host — Surrendering — the last — Nor even of Defeat — aware — When cancelled by the Frost —

Creed by Abigail Carroll, p.196-197 I believe in the life of the word, the diplomacy of food. I believe in salt-thick ancient seas and the absoluteness of blue. A poem is an ark, a suitcase in which to pack the universe—I believe in the universality of art, of human thirst for a place. I believe in Adam's work of naming breath and weather—all manner of wind and stillness, humidity and heat. I believe in the audacity of light, the patience of cedars, the innocence of weeds. I believe in apologies, soliloquies, speaking in tongues; the underwater operas of whales, the secret prayer rituals of bees. As for miracles— the perfection of cells, the integrity of wings—I believe. Bones know the dust from which they come; all music spins through space on just a breath. I believe in that grand economy of love that counts the tiny death of every fern and white-tailed fox. I believe in the healing ministry of phlox, the holy brokenness of saints, the fortuity of faults—of making and then redeeming mistakes. Who dares brush off the auguries of a storm, disdain the lilting eulogies of the moon? To dance is nothing less than an act of faith in what the prophets sang. I believe in the genius of children and the goodness of sleep, the eternal impulse to create. For love of God and the human race, I believe in the elegance of insects, the imminence of winter, the free enterprise of grace.

The Sky is full to the brim with autumn as the season makes its way to across it. It is as if I had no worries at all. so I could count all the stars nestled in autumn. Yet i cannot quite finish counting all those stars that are settling in my heart one by one, because mornings have a way of coming swiftly, because tomorrow's night is still to come, and because the fire of my heart hasn't burn out yet. I see memories in one star and love in another and loneliness my longings and poetry in each and Mother in another, Mother. Mother, I am trying to call out a beautiful word for each star. Names of the kids I shared desk with in a grade school, such foreign girls names as Pae, Kyeong, Ok, and the girls who have become mothers already, my poor neighbors, the doves, puppies, rabbits, mules, roe deer, Francies Jammes and Rheiner Maria Rilke - I call such names of poets. They are all so far away from me. Just as the stars are ever distant. And mother, you are in North Gando which is so far away. Longing for something I couldn't name, I wrote my own name on this hill which is bright with all the starlight landing, but then I covered it up again with dirt. True, some insects chirp through the night because they lament their shameful names. Yet when spring comes around to my star after winter, even on this hill where my name is buried, shrubs will grow thick as if boasting like the green grass that sprouts on a grave.

Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.

Chambre moulée dans la chaleur, mezcal, sourde lueur, langue de feu à ton chevet, l'ombre du ventilateur un immense papillon, dans l'oubliette de la fenêtre tarentule giflant le mur dans la nuit blanche noire étoile, oiseaux de grand chemin, bourdons assassinés dans leurs palais de cire, insectes pétillantes brindilles, longues fourmis s'insinuant. (Le Chantimane, 1997)

I Once Was A Bee by Stewart Stafford I once was a bee, All striped and dorky, I got crushed underfoot, By Amber Heard's Yorkie. It mashed my wings, I never sought money, Even when it made me, Poop out some honey. As I flew to Bee Heaven, In a mystical fog, She made such a fuss, Of that murdering dog. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

The languid afternoon. Insects, droning on into the night. Charon lies at the bottom of his rowboat, thinking about his life.

How I Get My Ideas (The Sonnet) You wanted to know how I get my ideas, The universe speaks to me. You wanted to know how my words appear, The soil and the air hand them to me. You asked how do I speak for every culture, I listen to the heart beyond the word. You asked how am I not bound by geography, Long ago I turned my inner walls into dust. You said to me that I should have some fun, I'll indeed have fun when the fallen are lifted. You wanted to know why do I care at all, That's because I am an alive human not an insect. Instead of asking why and how a human acts human, If there is no such being around why not be the first one!

World! Oceans! Wind! Sunset! Sunrise! I have seen all the colours of life. Drops falling from leaves in early morning, And beautiful flowers bloom breaking virginity, Silence almost like darkness, And that milky light of moon, Robust monsoon fighting big trees, All these are dear to my heart! Poor life of insects, Birds chirping like Goddess singing melody, And at last if you have a lover beside? Friends! Then desires also become noble!

If the bible comes and peddles phobia, I'll burn such bible to ashes. If the koran comes and peddles violence, I'll tear up such koran to pieces. If the vedas come and peddle superstition, I'll crush such filth to pulp with my foot. If the constitution comes and peddles war, As concerned parent I'll grab their makers, And spank out all their dormant good. Even if some two-bit God comes, And peddles division, I'll divide him so many times, Even to his apostles, He'll bear no recognition. And a little word of advise to those, Priming their guns, swords and tridents. When a volcano erupts, Insects are supposed to run, Not hide behind bows, arrows and bibles. Brain is mightier than bullets, Heart is mightier than the homunculus. When a 3 pound brain falls on bigoted bugs, There is no running, only burning to cinders.

I have cursed your forehead your belly your life I have cursed the streets your steps plod through The things your hands pick up I have cursed the inside of your dreams I have set a puddle in your eye that can't see any more An insect in your ear that can't hear any more A sponge in your brain that can't understand any more I have frozen you in the soul of your body Iced you in the depths of your life The air you breathe suffocates you The air you breathe has the air of a cellar Is an air that has already been exhaled been puffed out by hyenas The dung of this air is something no one can breathe Your skin is damp all over Your skin sweats out waters of the great fear Your armpits reek far and wide of the crypt Animals stop dead as you pass Dogs howl at night, their heads raised toward your house You can't run away You can't muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet Your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body Your fatigue is a long caravan Your fatigue stretches out to the country of Nan Your fatigue is inexpressible Your mouth bites you Your nails scratch you No longer yours, your wife No longer yours, your brother The sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake Someone has slobbered on your descendants Someone has slobbered on the laugh of your little girl Someone has walked slobbering by the face of your domain The world moves away from you I am rowingo I am rowing I am rowing against your life I am rowing I split into countless rowers To row more strongly against you You fall into blurriness You are out of breath You get tired before the slightest effort I row I row I row

Dear Lotus Flower, Just like you, my roots were always latched in the mud. I envied you because you were in the dark, murky water only at night—when the daylight arose, you bloomed. Unlike you, I was submerged in nasty water every day and night, but the light abandoned me. Came the morning light, and somehow miraculously, you rebloomed, sparkling, and so clean. I sort of bloomed at night with the moonlight and stars. However, the next morning I wasn’t so lucky because the morning light was nowhere to be found. Things got better for me slowly but surely. I must say, no matter how many times our roots were in the dirtiest water, we survived. We survived because our roots provided the nutrients that allowed us to bloom. I read that a lotus flower at times only partially opens, and the center is hidden. Just like you, there were times when I slowly opened up to people. I hid my inner core because mentally, I didn’t know who to trust. However, I arose from the midst of suffering. Again, just like you, I withstood highly adverse conditions and had to repair myself mentally and physically. Nobody knows, but you are my favorite flowers. We are unique, and we have so much in common. Your shadowy, murky origin found enlightenment as you were on the hunt for light. I, too, was on the quest for light for many years. For 16 years, I was thirsty for light, and now my thirst is quenched. All of those years, I yearned and wanted to break free and bloom. However, I had to keep moving, growing, and believing. My soul is no different from a Lotus flower. I didn’t start my journey in fresh water because my environment was not pleasant. Just like a Lotus flower, my life was surrounded by insects, debris, and so many unpleasant things and people. However, just like the Lotus petals are never contaminated by the murky water, my core remained pure. Just like the Lotus flower, I came from a place of suffering. However, I remained true to myself. I have overcome many obstacles in my life. I am proud of myself—because this time, I jumped a little higher over the hurdles. I have finished the never-ending race. I have officially crossed the finish line and have a fresh start! I am renewed, and I am loved! Triumph should be my middle name because I never gave up.

Metamorphosis A beetle woke up one morning to find it had become Franz Kafka. There were many challenging issues. It had no literary background. How it yearned for its former life, free amongst the silky flowers and fragrant leaves. The beetle’s journals in their scratchy scrawl were dark with pessimism and thoughts of suicide. What is the point of books it kept asking. What is the point. In the end they will only be consumed by insects. so its books came slowly. It was stuck with a tedious public service job. An angry fiancée turned up and demanded it marry her without further delay. The beetle felt no attraction to her but could not explain why.

Stormy Sunday by Stewart Stafford Coffee offsets the stormy Sunday, Thundery fingers scratch the drum, The coal-black sky stares unamused, A dim rainbow stripe upon its back. The understudy sun punches through, Slamming into a house's white gable, Blinding against the dark backdrop, The shushing showers rage angrier. Liquid beading on the window pane, Translucent insects marching slipshod, Weather duellists go back and forth, A primal rolling flux rumbling on. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

It is not by breath of wind that atmosphere is tempered. In no droplet's hands shall you find clasped the reigns of my ever-storming fury. Your inscribed ice is as meek to me as a crushed insect is meek in the face of the gods to whom your mountains pray. Live then in perpetuity, and be assimilated into my undying storm.

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Sōseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, “a physiological delight” he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves. As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kantō region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons. Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas. Indeed one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature.

A summer insect Falls dead Into my book - Masaoka Shiki

We are the fish in front of the waterfall. We are the insects inside the cage. We are the ruins of the billows, The skull of the crosier, The force of the torrent and the whale that drinks it. We are the five-horned bull. We are the fire-breathing monster. And the screaming children. Oh, we are poisoned by the moonlight.

Sounds" Few are the sounds that deepen and enrich silence .. There are sounds without which silence remains incomplete, like a ticking clock or the sudden sound of a cycling fridge… The chirping roaches and cicadas, or croaking frogs… Then there are those sounds that make existence more alienating and unbearable, like the scuffle of a big insect against a window or a door as if committing suicide! Or a creaking rusty door we close behind a departing loved one, knowing deep inside that they won’t return and nothing would be the same after closing that door.. The whistling sound of a kettle declaring that peace and tranquility are illusions that never last… There are also those sounds that summarize the traumas of the past from which hearers never recover, like the screams and cries of the woman next door when beaten by her husband… The coughing, spitting, and heavy breathing of an elderly woman we visited in our childhood… And can we ever forget the sounding sirens of the ships and trains declaring that departure is inevitable? [Original poem published in Arabic on September 15, 2023 at ahewar.org]

Even though I was driving, writing, I shut my eyes, and they all became available to me: the venation of leaf and insect wing, the Lichtenberg figure in the grass where the discharge took place, delicate crazing in blue grass, the network of vessels against the black back of the lids, self-similar golden spirals, the fractals formed by riverbeds and neurons, honeycomb lattices, habits, all the beautiful conspiracies, which means "to breath together," the ancient dream of poetry.

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

Every breath we take from the air Takes oxygen from an insect’s lungs mid-prayer And every exhalation does loudly declare That in the currency of life, we’re millionaires. A butterfly flapped it’s wings and Rome fell A passerby’s whistle cracked the liberty bell And I dare urge the daring not to yell Lest we so bid a skyscraper a rough farewell. A snake’s tongue slithered and man did sin Let me tell you how the waves from a shark’s fin Did set the tides on D-Day and let the allies win; Chance and destiny are identical twins. A word was spoken and the earth created Another phrase and the future was dictated And so every action must be carefully weighted We just never know how things are interrelated.

Self-Portrait as Mango She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country? I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes are what margins like me know everything about, right? Doesn’t a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn’t a mango a placeholder in a poem folded with burkas? But this one, the one I’m going to slice and serve down her throat, is a mango that remembers jungles jagged with insects, the river’s darker thirst. This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds. Why use a mango to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this “exotic” fruit won’t be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you. This mango isn’t alien just because of its gold-green bloodline. I know I’m worth waiting for. I want to be kneaded for ripeness. Mango: my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled, mango I suck open with teeth. Tappai! This is the only way to eat a mango.

Product that I Like." By Aron Micko H.B Arena, the most intense place; Belittle doers doing old space. Aroma smell now is embrace; Believable inspiration does race. Behavior no show cyberspace; Aurora lights direction to trace. Bottle available I thought vase; Athena the woman no replace. Area of insects fly every place; Breakable walls, now staircase. Aurora of an old do showcase; Bumble yellow shirt suitcase. Beatle seeing nope workplace; Armilla thing shines misplace. Bicycle rides the commonplace; Antenna sales I avail outpace.

A butterfly in a caterpillar prison Illustrates a solitary ideal, that ideas are the insects of achievement set aloft by chromatic, galactic wings.

Wise men in their bad hours have envied The little people making merry like grasshoppers In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking Backward but never forward, and if they somehow Take hold upon the future they do it Half asleep, with the tools of generation Foolishly reduplicating Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too, Groan against labors, wars and partings, Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended The summer insects enviable; One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery. Strength and desire possess the future, The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers, Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made Something more equal to the centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened nor troubled And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

believe, then, / in the mosquito: how it begins to take / your blood - heat and ghost and age and itch / as you press the net to your temples / and scratch in wild belief while / outside, leaves darken, insects / bite, and you smash a body / with the back / of your palm.

Primitive man has never been able to limit his needs to what is strictly necessary. His friendships among the souls are not confined to the creatures that are useful to his body or dangerous to his life. When we see how man in his poetry, his myths and legends creates an imaginative counterpart of his surroundings, how he arranges his ceremonial life, at times indeed his whole life, according to the heavens and their movement, how at his festivals he dramatizes the whole creation of his limited world through a long series of ritual scenes, we gain some idea how important it was to him to underpin his spiritual existence. His circle of friends spans from the high lights of heaven to the worm burrowing in the soil; it includes not only the bug that may be good to eat, but also innocuous insects that never entered into his list of delicacies; it comprises not only the venomous snake, but also harmless crawling things that have no claim on his interest save from the fact of their belonging to his country.

Together We Are Humans (The Sonnet) Together we are humans, separate we are apes. Together we are life, separate we are dust. Together we are tools, separate we are weapons. Together we are a boon, separate we are a curse. Together we are power, separate we are insects. Together we are sanity, separate we are lunacy. Together we are serenity, separate we are misery. Together we are harmony, separate we are catastrophe. Together we are diversity, separate we are phobia. Together we are purity, separate we are pollution. Together we are savannah, separate we are a desert. Together we are family, separate we are desolation. Together we are to grow as beings of conscience and character, Or else our lives are futile and will fade away in time's murmur.