Heaven for Insects and Such & Stragglers
By David B. Prather
Heaven for Insects and Such
For fireflies, it is as simple as darkness,
a mimicry of stars. Joy hovers
just out of reach of children’s hands,
a slow drift upward into the godly
shade of trees. Crickets compose
songs to late summer, to the setting
sun, to the labyrinth of grasses
grown too tall along the fence.
They wouldn’t have it any other way.
Ants praise their plots and paths.
They need nothing more than arable earth
and a few drops of dew that cling
to the stems of switchgrass and fescue
bowing low to early morning
as it scatters across the field. And you know
the only truth for moths is light,
but only spots and specks adrift
through neighborhoods in the widespread
night, the moon
always turning its face, in phases, away.
Cicadas and ladybugs know their own
pleasures. A praying mantis believes
in constant penitence. A spider weaves
the edges of the world together.
I know this.
She starts with the branches of an apple tree
just starting to bend low with fruit.
Stragglers
Crickets leap up from some underworld.
I put my feet upon the earth, and darkness below
erupts, breaks into a panic.
And so with clouds. They tear themselves apart,
throw themselves down, all their pieces
coming together, running away.
Wind rushes in to tug a few leaves loose
from apple trees I still need to prune, remove
those sucker limbs that took all summer
to choke out any remaining light.
One last wasp
stumbles around the edges of the roof,
in search of something that cannot be found,
which begins just as weather
turns to frost, breath to ghost.
Later, streets fill with forsaken leaves,
oak and maple, dogwood and sycamore.
It will look like the residue of revolutionaries who march
from here toward justice and hope, two mythic locations
I have never seen. Migratory birds
long since left their nests, following some savior
away from here, toward what paradise
I do not know. What I do know is that
a few spiders hang onto their webs.
They cling to windows and railings.
They cling to the promise of a last meal,
the promise that what little left is enough.
But I can’t tell you what is enough.
I can’t tell you about the light
dragged off by the sun,
how it lingers
at the edge of the world while I
watch, not wanting
to go.
David B. Prather is the author of We Were Birds (Main Street Rag Publishing). His work has appeared in several print and online journals, including Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Seneca Review, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Pif Magazine, and many others. He studied acting in New York at The National Shakespeare Conservatory, and he studied writing at Warren Wilson College. He currently lives in Parkersburg, WV.