Wasps
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1
Five black wasps on a Joe Pye bloom.
Lillian spitting tobacco juice on a swelling sting.The wasp that stung Anna when she carried that first baby.And here the birthmark on my ankle from the wasp that stung my mother.Here a stain of café au lait no larger than an eraser’s tip.Here the song writ by a wasp who witnessed a mother’s cry, Ah! Ah!Here on my skin, my first lesson: in every hurta flesh to wear, a keepsake.
And here beside a newly dug grave, a wasp settles on my eyelidI stand still, grave-still, the still of earth atop a coffin’s lid.The wasp holds me. It will not let go,as if to chide with its bright dagger, O death where is thy sting?The wasp lays its body against my eye, forbidsme to turn, or to look away: grief plies a paltry venom.
2
Once a wasp lit on my eye, the transformed wasp from an ancient story, come to tell its tale.
An unloved woman sat on a stone. She corn-rowed her hair into twelve twigs.From the broken strands of her hair a wasp was made, evilbird, evil bird with an iron arrow—a quiver of poison.
3
My hair will give birth to wasps.Can you say it’s not so?
Can you say that this fleshis any more than shaped dust and a spit of venom?
4
Shift even one shadow, a wasp,a wasp circling the eavesof a training school for colored children,or say mud wasp, instead of paper wasp,and I may lose my way.
Memory, history—guided by strange compasses,taking roundabout routes, wasps turning,returning, all a-hum, hum, hum, and filled with sting.
Can you say it’s not so?
The wasp learns its way home (Tinbergen proved it) and returns,maybe to the head of a black boy (remember when he was stungand Lillian spat tobacco juice on the swelling?), maybeto a graveside where a woman stands mourning, maybeto a young woman’s leg, a woman carrying her first child,a child marked by anger, or maybe chance, or maybe forewarning.
The head that stirs the wasp, the proverb says,gets stung. Time wasp, grief wasp, even the waspthat might be joy—searching for its remembered home,each bearing its sting. Be still … be still. But stillthey stab, making us cry, or widen an eye, or reach. [End Page 201]
Janice N. Harrington, born in Vernon, Alabama, is author of two books of poems, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (winner of the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Discovery Award) and The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home. She also publishes books for children. Harrington’s poems have appeared widely in periodicals and anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry and the forthcoming Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford UP, 2nd edition). She teaches creative writing in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
