Vivian Smith

Can we learn wisdom watching insects now, or just the art of quiet observation? Creatures from the world of leaf and flower marking weather’s variation. The huge dry summer of the ladybirds (we thought we’d never feel such heat again) started with white cabbage butterflies sipping at thin trickles in the drain. Then one by one the ladybirds appeared obeying some far purpose or design. We marvelled at their numbers in the garden, grouped together, shuffling in a line. Each day a few strays turned up at the table, the children laughed to see them near the jam exploring round the edges of a spoon. One tried to drink the moisture on my arm. How random and how frail seemed their lives, and yet how they persisted, refugees, saving energy by keeping still and hiding in the grass and in the trees. And then one day they vanished overnight. Clouds gathered, storm exploded, weather cleared. And all the wishes that we might have had in such abundance simply disappeared.

Disturbed at 2 a.m. I hear a claw scratching the window, tapping at the pane, and then I realise, a broken branch, and yet I can’t turn back to sleep again. Slowly, not to wake you, I get up, thinking of food, perhaps a quiet read. A cockroach runs across the kitchen floor, its lacquered shell as quick and dry as seed. Outside the chalice lily lifts its cup in adoration to the mirrored moon, full of purpose as it trembles there, collecting drops of moisture on its spoon. Noises of the night, it’s all alive, birds shifting in the steady trees, slugs and snails eating fallen flowers, a moth freighted with fragilities. Nocturnal life, the other side of things, proceeding whether we observe or not, like rows and rows of brown coastal ants transporting food from here to another spot.

What images could yet suggest their range of tender colours, thick as old brocade, or shot silk or flowers on a dress where black and rose and lime seem to caress the red that starts to shimmer as they fade? Like something half-remembered from a dream they come from places we have never seen. They chatter and they squawk and sometimes scream. Here the macaw clings at the rings to show the young galahs talking as they feed with feathers soft and pink as dawn on snow that it too has a dry and dusky tongue. Their murmuring embraces every need from languid vanity to wildest greed. In the far corner sit two smoky crones their heads together in a kind of love. One cleans the other’s feathers while it moans. The others seem to whisper behind fans while noble dandies gamble in a room asserting values everyone rejects. A lidded eye observes, and it reflects. The peacocks still pretend they own the yard. For all the softness, how the beaks are hard.