Hornets’ Nests

​
Hundreds of them, accursed, their papery gray masses
hidden in eaves, in the junctures of two-by-fours,
or hanging in shrubs or behind olive branch foliage,
wait to be opened.  Even long-abandoned nests,
those which turn immediately to ash at the poke of a broomstick,
threaten revenge.  Inside their hexagram cells,
everything seems quivering, thrumming, as if the workers know
death will come at first frost—each worker’s venom gone to waste
unless he can attack, protecting his basketball-sized empire.
And at the heart of everything, the larger body of sorrow
that will not die unless, from far away in the shadows,
we fill her nest with poison spray, or knock it down
battering it, torching it when it falls, so that in some holy tomorrow
we may walk, unmolested, over the great green pastures.

in Present Vanishing (Sarabande Books)

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