I can see deities hiding inside insects,
smell a flower’s invisible glow
but I cannot see beyond my visions
-Marc di Saverio (2013). Sanatorium Songs, 46.
Tomorrow’s grasshoppers will stridulate. Hear them today.
Today’s grasshoppers are tomorrow’s locusts.
They hymn strident anthems
from their choirs in the wheat.
At dusk I followed their resinous bowing to the creek.
I have never seen a locust drink water, although I know they do.
I saw grasshoppers grip reed stalks.
From their rods, they watched me.
I saw grasshoppers on the blotted dirt banks.
I heard not one single cricket.
At dawn there were white flowers of wild carrot
among the reeds, hovering next to riffle and run.
The Sun had not risen, but the flowers shone their disk of stars.
Everything is about to be eaten.
We talk of consumers, but we describe a summation.
The creek continues out of my sight.
There used to be frogs who ate the grasshoppers.
Now the grasshoppers are freed from their riparian prisons,
the winds are thrown open,
and fires spread around them.
I cannot see beyond my visions.
A creek trickles beyond a distant vanishing point,
and even that point is now obscured by smoke.
-- Pushcart Prize nominee, researcher & farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poetry and literary criticism have been published in numerous journals. His Erdös number is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first 2 writing grants.