Welcome to my Poetry Friday Halloween party. Here’s the guest of honor and winner of the costume contest. Anyone know who my little beetle is? I found him on a lilac. He was about the length of my thumb nail. I searched, but I didn’t find him in any identification database. I was enchanted by all the things we was not, so I wrote this poem for him:

Beetle Guess

I have six striped legs
and a beetle I may be,
but I am not a jewel,
a false bombardier,
a golden tortoise
a horse-bean longhorn,
a globemallow leaf,
nor a pleasing fungus.

I may have flirted with
a darkling, teased an
assassin, ridden
a devil’s coach horse,
but I’m not ironclad,
death-feigning, clicked,
blistered, net-winged
or any form of weevil.

If you call me an ox or
a coconut rhinoceros, then
we shall not be friends.

I dreamed I was an
Ashy Gray Lady,
but when I woke,
I was not.

When I come back,
I want to be a whirligig
and dance circles on
sunny lake water.

Or perhaps a
fiery skipper
turning circles in
the wind.

Most of all,
I want to know myself.

Copyright 2017 Brenda Davis Harsham

Notes: My beetle may be none of these things, cool as they are, but then — what is he? He looks closest to a tree borer, so chances are he was helping himself to sap. Does anyone know?

And did you know Massachusetts has a shamrock spider? I didn’t.

An alarming new study found that flying insect populations have declined by three-quarters in twenty-five years! Scary numbers. We need to be better stewards of the earth, or we will find ourselves being the pollinators in the fields.

Happy Poetry Friday and Nearly Happy Halloween! If you’ve participated before, you know what to do. If you haven’t, please click the blue box anytime in the next week and add a link to your blog with a post highlighting an original poem, quoting a favorite poem or reviewing poetry. Click here (if the link doesn’t seem to be working, please leave your link in the comments):