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To the Person Who Stole the Paper Wasp Nest from my Dashboard

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 26, 2013| 1 Comment »

It wasn’t mine, either.
My son found it this winter
on the orchard floor.
The orchard wasn’t ours anymore.
But when we left from visiting the new owners,
we put the thin celled scrap
on the dash of my car
and left it there.
The wasps, it wasn’t really theirs, either.
They gathered the fibers
from dead wood and plant stems
and mixed it with their saliva.
And I suppose we could say
that the plants and trees
had taken from the soil,
the sun, the rain.
My teacher says
everything you love
can and will be taken from you.
For a long time, that felt
like a curse until
it began to feel like freedom—
not the losses themselves,
but the acceptance of loss.
It’s not that I loved
the brown paper wasp nest,
though it did remind me
of that day when we walked
on the rails and no trains came
and my son sang for an hour
at the top of his lungs.
Add this to the list
of the things that cannot be owned.
The song. The memory.
The boy. The land.
A sense of security.
The open, empty combs.

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