Failure
I failed to submit this to the Consilience journal for poems about science for their issue on Failure.
Sorry cicada
I was a kid
I didn’t know what you were
I thought you were dead
I tried to pick you off the sidewalk by one of your wings
When you buzzed
So I stomped on you.
Sorry dragonfly
I was a teen
I was with my brothers in a field at a campground
I swatted you accidentally on purpose while playing badminton
I couldn’t figure out what you were even with my new insect ID book
When I realized
You no longer had a head.
Sorry cockroach
I was an adult
I had moved to my ancestral country
I was living on my own for the first time
I was about to go to bed on the first night in my new old place
When you scuttled onto the pristine white sliding door
So I smacked you with the sole of a slipper
And you left a stain on my no longer pristine white sliding door.
Sorry
I failed to appreciate your wonderosity.
When I was in university I met a physics guy who,
when I told him I was a zoologist,
said, “Oh, you kill things.”
And he wasn’t wrong.