Let us mourn the dead.
Yesterday I drove three hundred miles
I parked the car and looked out
Through the windscreen in dismay.
There were no splattered insects.
‘Shall I check the oil, sir?’
‘Check the tyre pressures?
‘Clean the windscreen?’
Voices from an age long gone.
These days the engines do not leak oil,
The tyres do not leak air
And there are no insects to splatter
The windscreen.
I looked up into the blue
Summer sky and it was empty.
No more flocks of swifts
Chasing each other
Shrieking in delight;
No more blue tinged swallows
Diving to skim the grass
And snatch their dinner
From the air
Opher – 18.4.2019
The flies, bees, crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies and bugs are gone.
In my youth the meadows were strewn with splashes of colour and alive with the buzz of life.
I’d lie on my back and watch ladybirds crawling up the flower-heads, beetles scurrying in the undergrowth and, up above, the birds soared, wheeled and dived.
It felt like heaven.
There were frogs and newts in the ponds, sticklebacks in the streams, lizard, slowworms and snakes in the fields.
At night the voles, shrews and hedgehogs came out from their dens.
But they all live off insects.
They are spraying all the fields again today.