Friday Poem: "June, Mostly Cloudy, Chance of Storms"

This poem happened on a gray afternoon in our first house in Baltimore after my first year as a public school teacher, which might account for the emotional state of the first stanza. "Tiwaz" is the 17th letter in the Elder Futhark runes and resembles an upward-pointing arrow.

June, Mostly Cloudy, Chance of Storms

I don’t know if the paper wasp,
exhausted against the inside
of the dimming windowpane,
is a figure of hope or despair.
Its stillness—thin-stemmed wings
held in repose, abdomen like a twig—
makes it a rune: tiwaz,
carved in a birch spear-shaft,
stained dark with a palm’s blood,
dropped on a February snowfield.

And yet the threads of its antennae
rest penitent on the glass,
as if to receive divine illumination
from twilight the color of blown smoke:
it won’t drag its feet across the glass,
make any human gesture of futility—
as if it accepts the limits of its reach
and cannot identify with the hollow
mummified bluebottles in the sill—
but waits for another sunrise,
the covenant in the open whisper of trees.

This poem originally appeared in Softblow.