About Wasps
(for Ian Wedde)
In pipes, in tins
in broken clay,
under a ledge of brick or wood,
hung from a tree,
anywhere
a cavity is formed,
hidden, secret,
now, at this time,
October,
the dormant queens begin
to sniff the wind,
twelve degrees
expected maximum
in Wellington today,
along the cliffs
of Maida Vale
and Lyall Bay
Vespula germanica is seeking
out a place,
those brittle mothers
with ten thousand, maybe
more eggs ranged
inside the abdomen.
Not this winter
but the one before
in my house above
the sea I turned the bricks
I’d stacked
for paving and retaining
in my crumbling
garden
and found them there, a dozen
or so
of the hibernating queens, huge,
yellow, sluggish,
cold, stiff as ancient metal rusted up
(the first one blundered
in my Christchurch kitchen
yesterday. I hammered
it with a rolled-up
newspaper). Those
rigid winter queens
I rolled out in the wind
and let them die
feeling
more part of the natural
cycle of
the garden for
doing so.
The nest
by March or April
brims
with workers, queens and
drones, the cells
are packed
with pupae, larvae
and sweet food,
royal jelly
culled from aphids, jam
and fruit,
but by late May
or early June
after the workers have
cannibalized the nest
and gorged themselves
and ceased to come back
home
and the queens have
danced above the trees
and mated,
the rats and mice move in
and rip the nest apart
and shred
the paper honeycomb
to line
their own dark holes.
And now, today,
those queens who made it
through the winter
they
begin to venture out
in
slow cumbersome
flight,
they test
the equinoctial wind
not knowing yet
what is happening
on the updraft and the down,
why even
sleep has stopped
and they
fly at all
yet in this state
one will clip
herself
to the grey, splintered
side of a lamppost
and with her jaws
scrape off
small wood
and chew it up
and swallow it
and regurgitate the mash
a pulp for making
paper,
the first stutter
of the new
Murray Edmond
from Letters and Paragraphs (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1987)
‘About Wasps’
‘About Wasps’ was published in my book Letters and Paragraphs (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1987). Recently I did an interview with Scott Hamilton for his online journal Reef Shark. The subject Scott chose for this interview was this book, Letters and Paragraphs. I was intrigued and engaged by his proposition. The first half of this interview can be found on this link.
The second half of the interview will appear soon.
When you go back and look at old poems, not all of them stand up as well as you hoped; however, ‘About Wasps’ seemed to me to still possess life.
‘About Wasps’ is dedicated to Ian Wedde. On 14th October this year, 2026, Ian celebrated his 80th birthday. This is another reason for reviving the poem at this time. There’s something in the poem about birth and death and rebirth in relation to the life cycle of the European wasp, Vespa germanica. Perhaps this has an analogical relation to the life, death and rebirth of poems.
Murray Edmond: born Kirikiriroa 1949; lives in Glen Eden, Tāmaki-makau-rau. Recent publications: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s (Atuanui Press, 2021) – cultural history; FARCE and Sandbank Sonnets: A Memoir, (Compound Press, 2022) – 2 books of poems; Aucklanders (Lasavia, 2023), a book of 15 short stories.
Poetry Shelf is hosting another festival season of Playing Favourites. Poets have selected a poem of their own that they love, usually previously published.
