Speaking with the quiet voice of death,

each August, mum would say

those wasps

I'll get a jam jar out.

The top would be pierced

with the round, grey knife sharpener.

I liked doing that,

it was satisfying

to make the hole,

the hole of death.

It would work.

The wasps would enter entranced,

tempted, bewitched, seduced

by the sweetness within.

The luscious, sugary fruit of the jam.

Once through the hole,

the hole of death,

which I had made,

with no malice,

they never emerged.

Gorged and exhausted

they fell one by one

into the water

prepared by mum

in her quiet way

as their grave.

 

The thought of it all inhabits my mind now,

with a strangeness.

I am compelled to ponder

the fate of the wasps,

which were compelled to enter

then trapped, trapped

in a world of sensual pleasure

from which there was no escape

but death.

The range of our senses is limited.

There are sounds we cannot hear.

Did they shriek before they died

how pleasure had betrayed them?

Did they know how the search for delights

had led to their doom?

 

And did a wasp

ever find a way out?