Summer Theater

As a bulbous puce spider

sits still in its web waiting
for an insect to stick,
a butterfly bounds through
sunshine, alights to sip water
from a deep green wet leaf.

Bees maul lavendar blossoms.
An iridescent blue dragonfly
cruises by & a hummingbird
pulls up & parks mid-air
to sip nectar from a fire-red
crocosmia flower. Crows

sit on wires, roofs, and branches,
silently picking mites from feathers.
Summer theater, quite show--
I'm glad to see and know it.

hans ostrom 2024

Dragonfly Corpse Recovery

A blueberry's what
the head of the dead dragonfly
looked like.

A blueberry with a small
metallic visor attached.  Do you
covet video
of what was perceived and how
through that mono-goggle? Me, too.

The body looked like one of two
elegant eyebrow
from under which a Persian woman
looks wisely
upon the world. And the wings?
Stained glass

done in ash-gray, or crystal
camouflage
for hiding in fog. When the head
fell off
and fell into a paper cup,
it sounded like a final pebble
hitting a coffin.

The legs were a bunching of
collapsed angles,
the knees so terribly delicate.

Things fall apart.  Creatures, too.
But it's also true
that this dragonfly was one of those
beings that show

how Evolution's patience delivers
functional art
and inspired form to its client,
the unsentimental Earth.



hans ostrom 2017

I Demand to Know

A dragonfly, wearing standard-issue
lead goggles, downshifts its wings,
which when still look like foggy
cracked windows. Resting,

this dragonfly pulses. Its curved
blue tail befriended a scorpion
once during a vacation in Mexico.

I demand to know
what this dragonfly thinks.


hans ostrom 2016