FLIES OF NEW ZEALAND
The four largest orders of the arthropods:
Beetles Coleoptera
Butterflies and moths Lepidoptera
Ants, bees and wasps Hymenoptera
Flies Diptera
The name is medical, and mythical too
Something about the nineteenth century, some
Thing about spots on skin. But now, small aerial organisms
That live with us all summer
I find I quite like flies.
Whatever you do don’t look them up
The romance will go
Nobody has much good to say about flies.
The slender lesser house fly with its straight median vein
There’s a lot of them and they’re beautiful in their way.
There is no other fly for me.
WHY WE ARE NOTHING SPECIAL
My codons are your codons grasshopper
The biophysical One, the many Many.
Are you female, by the way?
Outside the Milky Way there can’t be any just like you
But inside, fuck, Andromeda spins for you.
Just like you grasshopper, more special than the Milky Way.
If I’m not good enough is it because I’m human
Even though I share your basic equipment?
Grasshopper why are you a god?
COCKROACH
It’s a bit perhaps like being in a WWII tank
There’s a carapace
I see out
Others like me surging forward
Different beings come at me
I hear a bit but not much
The big noises
Explosions
Rat ta tat
I see out
Inside my shell I’m soft and perfect in my way
I’m more than me
I’m her and her and him
We’re having a party
Underneath my skin
Inside the Sherman tank
That is my hard plate
I see out
When the others lift off so will I
It’s not a big deal
THE LITTLE BLUE
Waotu Urupā
A grove of ancient tōtara on the top of a small hill in Waotū. Across cornfields, Maungatautari in the distance, Sanctuary Mountain blue grey under a powder blue sky. But the little blue butterfly sticks close to the ground, flying in and out of grass stalks just above the stippled gravestones. Strange to think about her lifecycle, beginning and ending in this urupā, as so many insect lives do. The imago is the last stage in a butterfly’s life, and this field is full of them under the tōtara, above the stones, between the stalks. They jerk, they flutter. The piwakawaka jerk and flutter too like the Little Blues, in and out of visibility, intersecting flight paths across the borderlines between shadow and light. But they are birds, and we’re talking about insects.
Lepidoptera are the glamour pusses of the arthropodia. Slugs, snails and worms, while softly palpable and fashionably slow, don’t feature much in the kinds of conversation ordinary people have. We seem to prefer the avian and mammalian fauna. The Lepidoptera, however, and to a certain extent the Hymenoptera exercise us somewhat. We consider flyways not just in terms of birds these days, and of course the Monarch is king. And queen – you can tell them apart. There is a couple here right now. But this is to accord the Monarch just the kind of attention we don’t want to.
For some there be which have no memorial, even amongst the Lepidoptera. Little Blues, tipuna lost and gone. Ecclesiastes says of these forgotten ones, the small ones who have flown too close to the ground, that they are become as though they had never been born. Is this not the better path? When the tōtara shadows cross the urupā and sink it into night we lift our eyes to the river and far Maungatautari, a mountain merging with the dark. In the last light we see an image of the past right here, at our feet, like that sanctuary on the horizon, like blue butterflies in a blue-grey field.