On a Lizard Day
The sun burns
Hot.
On a Lizard Day
Green leaves
Wilt
On a Lizard Day
Kids seek
Shade.
On a Lizard Day
The cat lies
Flat.
On a Lizard Day
Sweat trickles
Down.
On a Lizard Day
The swimming pool’s
Cool.
On a Lizard Day.
poetry
Summer Farewell
Sunrise over
Quiet water.
Waves roll in.
— • —
Anemones and
Starfish rule.
Snail goes slow.
— • —
Cliffs enclose
Sandy bays in
Rocky embrace.
— • —
Footprints
Tell
Stories.
— • —
Paddle slowly.
Quiet now.
Fish are sleeping.
— • —
Beach beckons
Sun is high
School threatens.
Poem on Moose
What happens when I let my daughter decorate Christmas cookies.
Literary ungulate
In gingerbread.
This poem is either
On a moose,
Or on moose,
Or both.
Your palmate antlers,
Distinctive,
Tell me you’re a bull.
They beg to be bitten off.
Then you would be a cow
Only your drooping nose
And your beard
Giving away your moosy nature.
But why a poem
On a moose
(Or on moose)?
I do not recommend
Writing poems on moose
(or is it mooses?)
Unless they are of the gingerbread variety.
The icing tickles
And moose (meece?) snort when they laugh.
But if you try,
I suggest a stepladder.
A Rose
R Weiss
roses
Christchuch Botanic Gardens
A rose, by any other name
Would still have thorns and be a pain.
Black spot, chafers, aphids, too,
Spider mites and powdery mildew.
Japanese beetles, leafcutter bees
It’s rife with pests and disease.
So go ahead, forget the rose
Plant a flower with fewer foes.
Sunflower, Daisy, there’s really a passel
Of flowers easy to grow without hassle.
No pruning, no spraying, no disease or thorns
For none of these things a gardener mourns.
Or better yet, just live with the weeds
They grow by themselves, and spread their own seeds.
Dandelion, yarrow, catsear and cress
All grow on their own and let the gardener rest.
Sunday Evening
Sunlight lingers in the western sky.
We sit in the darkening room,
Both curled up on the couch.
The ticking clock
And the rustle of a turning page
The only sounds.
The weekend is over
The mowing and weeding done.
Monday’s e-mail and phone calls
Can wait for morning.
For now, we escape
To other lands,
Other planets,
Other lives,
Where passion and drama
Are neatly wrapped up in 327 pages
Of plot lines converging
On hope.
Entogeeks Anonymous
You know you’re an entomologist when…
You find aphids on your lettuce, and eat it anyway.
You apologise to the grass grubs before squishing them.
You rescue the earwigs and lacewing larvae floating in the sink after washing vegetables.
You drop everything when you hear someone say, “Wow, look at that bug.”
You waste hours at work watching the spider on the window.
You keep a hand lens and a microscope within arms reach at all times, just in case.
The glove box of your car contains a folding insect net and several jars.
You sit down to write the day’s blog (a nice poem, you think), and get sidetracked for an hour trying to determine whether Mantophasmatodea is still considered a separate order or whether it is now grouped with the Grylloblattodea in the new order Notoptera.
*sigh*
Literary Transitions
The Bugmobile, before being turned into the Boringmobile.
When I took the sign writing off the Bugmobile, the kids dubbed it the “Boringmobile”. A plain white station wagon, like every other plain white station wagon in this land of millions of plain white station wagons.
I promised to do something to try to reclaim a little of the Bugmobile’s former glory, and decided that insect poems meandering around the edges of the windows would be easy and fun to do, and would be a sort of bridge between the Bug Lady who was, and the writer who is.
It has been a year and a half, but I’m finally getting around to the job. Here is the first of the poems for the new, literary Bugmobile.
Butterfly and dragonfly,
Honey bee on clover.
Thrips upon the flower heads,
And syrphid flies that hover.
Mantids hunting in the grass.
Crickets in the garden.
Caterpillars’ silk cocoons,
And beetle wings that harden.
Sparkle, glitter, flutter wing.
Bugs that hop, and bugs that sing.
All these wonders
Here to see.
A gift for you.
A gift for me.
Rain
I wake
To the sound of rain.
It is not morning.
It is the rain
That has dragged me from sleep.
No.
Not dragged.
It has nudged me awake
Accidentally
Like my husband does
When he comes to bed
(Night owl that he is,
And me an early riser).
Like my husband,
The rain has lain down beside me.
A comfort,
Knowing he is there,
Knowing the rain is there
Watering the garden,
Making the grass grow in the paddock,
Tamping down the dust.
Apologies, I’m tired…
When the day’s work is done
And exhaustion kicks in
And you want to collapse
You know you can’t win.
The blog must be written!
It doesn’t matter
That your hands are all blistered
And your mind is a tatter.
Just put down some words
Your readers won’t care
If you spell a few wrong
No need to rip out your hair.
Just type a few rhymes
They don’t need to be good.
Explain that you’re tired,
You’ll be understood.
Just whip out that blog post
In record time.
Then take a hot shower,
And a nice glass of wine.
White Noise
Sit down to write
Nothing comes out but a hiss
Can’t think of anything
Thinking of everything
All at once.
Sentence fragments
The smell of lemons
A stubbed toe
What should I make for dinner?
The grass needs mowing
Pizza
Warm sun on bare feet
Itchy back
My desk is a mess
The cat wants in
The cat wants out
Words on paper
Spell check.
Freckles
Clean the house
Wet paint
Elephants
Meteor showers
Drifts of flowers
Girls and boys
White noise.
Robinne Weiss 