Poem of the Week: 5.25.23
"Wasps I have eaten thinking they were figs" (Part 1/3)
This week’s poem is a part of a longer poem. Read next week’s PotW for Part 2!
WASPS I HAVE EATEN THINKING THEY WERE FIGS
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
A picket fence, a paltry gust One of those Doubting doubts: he was me *** The momentary apocalypse of waking up. I wanted an apocalypse to not deal with it all, dust flitting down from the fan above. *** But a forced peace ignores the street Children, frayed Careless justice of the deaf elite Another set of eyes loses color Prayers choked through gasps The news keeps breaking Twitter justice and Twitter war Emotions arrived by stream Scroll this conflict Too comfy on the two-seater Eyelids drooping, want washes away My hands are all that move to click Next
Thank you for reading the Poem of the Week! If I were counting how many of these Substack posts I’ve sent out, it’d be a large number. Thank you for reading, whether it’s your first time here (hi!) or your first time back (welcome!) or your Thursday morning routine (mwah!).
Poetry is not easy to digest. At first bite, the flavors are indescribable yet familiar. Swallow it and taste it and feel it, but it needs to spend time inside before it’s truly absorbed. Small bites are best, but sometimes the fork grabs more. Sometimes you choke instead of chewing. Sometimes you spit it out. Sometimes you forget all that you bit into until it’s there, staring back at you, and stinking up the bathroom.
That’s why I tend to keep my poetry short. I agree with the often misquoted words of Mark Twain, who more or less got the idea from Blaise Pascal, that “if I had more time, I would have written less.” This is a hard lesson for academics, educators, content creators, and everyone else who likes to hear themselves talk—but it is an important one. Less is more.
“Wasps I have eaten thinking they were figs” is one of my longer poems, so I will be breaking it up into a few parts to send out over the next few weeks. “Wasps…” started as a “notebook” poem, a collection of disparate thoughts combined as an archive or testament. I would say that it hinges on the idea of apocalypse, both the oh-shit-it’s-the-end-of-the-world kind and the kind where you have to get out of bed when you really don’t wanna. Realizations before the end, as well as ends that have not yet been realized. I used to call this poem “Reaching” to gesture to this idea of trying to make sense of life’s chaos, but I went with the longer “Wasps…” title instead to shift the focus more to how we only understand at or after an end. Future historians will eventually mark the date in which human civilization started its ultimate implosion—but to us, it will be just another Thursday.
I’m still making sense of this poem, and I’ve been writing and editing and reading it for about five years now. I think I digested it, but now it’s the fat I poke at and ponder. Feel free to leave your feedback below, as this poem is somewhat a work in progress. Part 2 next week.
Comfy, Ricky