"The American Burying Beetle"
"The American Burying Beetle
lives under only six states.
With its faceted
black and orange head, it resembles those
outfits in the 1920s when the tombs
at Karnak were explored.
The bug
belongs to the family Silphidae and
the genus Necrophorus, and during
this awful year when humans are upset,
the American burying beetle goes on at
the brink of extinction costing the oil
and gas industry millions of dollars while it
carries the bodies of dead creatures
underground to lay its eggs
on the corpses, lurching and
arching its femurs and its tarsi
and its geometrical bright parts
to farm the rotting flesh for its
larvae to feast on, and when they
are ready, to fly off from.
What
a wonder that so much exists
with no guile, that existence itself
has no rival and goes on as the thing
most steadily hoped for.
When I feel
desperate about humans, i think of this
worker under the six states remaking the dead."