LOVE AMONG THE CABBAGES

Fat green caterpillars, chewing machines (that now will never

try on their parental white broad bean flower wings in the genocide

of insecticide) have reduced the cabbages (ever so like the

prisoners in The Torture Garden buried up to their necks)

to an artful old maid’s garden tatted in green broderie anglaise,

which is pretty enough, but furnishes no coleslaw for the table.

Failing that, those chrysalises split tidily like paper in the spring

and as butterflies emerge in Sunday best bridal white powdered

outfits, hasten to frolic and sup nectar at their dayflower wedding

insect hallelujahs that they will no longer be forced

by their finicky digestions to subsist on goddam cabbage.

They are brave, I have seen four attack together

a giant orange Monarch. But it is at their most cocky that they are most

vulnerable to the sudden snap of a bird’s carved and polished beak.