Poetry Thursday

I felt like I was here ... and it reminded me of those walks on the beach with the bees and ladybugs washed up on the sand.

Funeral: For Us His Gold
~Alessandra Lynch
                    after Gerald Stern

The insect was yellow with crumpled-black banded legs
          and shellacked back that would outlast us
          and wistful eyes from what I could discern on that trail between
               fields,
and we laid him out in the open air under a sky fast-blue with change,
               wedging
          a leaf beneath his triple-belted belly so he didn’t rest on plain dirt,
          and we placed two cloverblooms by his head and he was old
you said, could tell by how definite the stripes were, how complete
          the patterns bold and dark, almost engraved,
and he was beautiful in that pasture of thirty-three cows and we drank
          milk in the blaring heat and ate the cake you’d made. We were
          the only humans there—unholy-seeming things with two legs,
               dismal histories—
drinking and eating around his elegant husk,
          and from the furze, fellow insects rose, a frenzied static around
               our bodies,
while he remained in situ an unremitting yellow, the color more
          vivid, louder now that he was a remnant. Was color the purpose
               here?
Yellow had alerted us to him, and we took care
          with leaf and clover to make his bed.
The insect’s gold our togetherness, its death from which we fed.