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The Forest Is Full of Dead Insects
By David Starkey

Scattered skeletons of potato bugs,
White as shaved ice, litter the pine straw.
Wedged inside the cracks of rotting logs,

Deceased beetles, their thoraces squashed,
Antennae still twitching, share dank coffins
With the season's final homeless cicadas.

The wasp, severed at her waist, softens
With the rains until she dissolves back into earth,
Into the same wet clay that made the laughing

Ladybird and that frail ephemerid,
The mayfly, which exists just to demonstrate
That death begins the moment of our birth.

Codling moth, drosophila, cockchafer,
Firebrat and silverfish--they all
Blend with the leaf mold, consecrated

By sun, wind and time. Listen: a pall
Of silence hangs above the trees. Suddenly,
A song begins, weak at first, then full

And frightening, a buzz, a wail, a keen,
The lament of a billion forgotten ghostly voices,
Not angry so much as bewildered. They seem

To have exhausted all other possible choices,
Their dirge inevitable. Or so one might think
Who listens closely to such things, and rejoices.