Northern Paper Wasp

A November heat wave. Temperature was near 60 degrees F today. Warm enough that a couple of paper wasps came out of hibernation. I saw two of these wasps on the sidewalk when I visited the library. These early winter wasps reminded me of this poem written after finding a wasp near the end of December some years ago.

NORTHERN PAPER WASPS (Polistes fuscatus)

These last weeks of December,
the snowiest on record,
I’ve been indoors reading
Howard Ensign Evans,
his Wasp Farm, chapters
on the spider wasps,
the great golden diggers,
the beewolves.

Now comes the release
of a mid-winter thaw,
then, more surprising still,
a Co-op of wasps found
scattered on a sidewalk
like a handful of small caliber
rifle bullets. They are hibernating
northern paper wasps
knocked down from the roofline
by birds or a collapse of roof-ice,
the pale sun on red brick
not nearly enough to wake them.
I pick one up gently,
carefully hold it in my fingertips.
This warm-blooded grip stirs
the sleeping queen
to stretch out a yellow leg
as though it were spring.

Back home, I take up the book,
flip forward through unread pages—
sure enough—the wasp
is waiting there as well,
the name and pronunciation:
po-LIST-eez fus-CATE-us.
I say it over and over—
the Greek meaning
founder of a city, the Latin
black, for its smoke-colored wings.

Posted on November 28, 2017 04:51 AM by scottking