"Tell Me About the Wasp Again"

by Rustin Larson

This is Michel Carey for Voices From the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is "Tell Me About the Wasp Again" by the Fairfield poet Rustin Larson. The wasp, the child and the grown man in this poem inhabit the same world but live in different ones, created of the same mud or dust with the same divinity inside. To me the poem is a reminder of the inexpressible holiness of even the smallest and most painful of beings around us and call for all of us to live in the same moment of space and time peacefully and unharmed.

"Tell Me About the Wasp Again"

The brown wasp clinging to the porch screen?
He was awakened, fooled by warm weather.
Today, February blossoms: the wasp
looks at you and me who smash flowers
on the porch steps with a round stone.
Perhaps he wonders what we will do with all
the green nectar, or worries we will exhaust
the yard of white flowers he has some claim to.
So, maybe we are not being fair; maybe
we cannot reassure him that before long we
will tire of it.
He is staring at you,
Jacob. You could squash him with a blow
of your tennis shoe. You could blow on
the screen and he would fly away.
Maybe he would jab one of us with his stinger –
the fine brown barb with a sack of poison that throbs heart-like
when its shaft is stabbed in flesh – but who says
we can’t inhabit the same triangle of time unharmed?

We will not tap the screen
where the wasp suns himself. We will watch
as he builds his house from mud; the same mud
we were, Jacob, before these bodies
were spun, and our souls poured into them.

"Tell Me About the Wasp Again" by Rustin Larson" from his manuscript Crazy Star and originally published in Loonfeather.

For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.

Rustin Larson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He was educated in Iowa and later earned an MFA from Vermont College of Norwich University. He is currently serving as Poet-in–the-Schools through the Iowa Arts Council. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications including: The New Yorker, America, Poetry East, Cimarron Review and Boundary 2. Loving the Good Driver, his first book, was published by Mellen Poetry Press in 1996. He lives in southeastern Iowa with his wife Caroline and their three daughters, Katharine, Sarah and Julia.