Garden Creatures in Verses (Patch of Eden Series)

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Dr Abe V Rotor

Squash beetle (Epilachna), Order Coleoptera  

If I make you into a ring,

Necklace or earring,

I rob the garden of beauty

and myself of digtnity.

Plant lice (Psylla) Order Homoptera, 

scourge of ipil-ipil (Leucaena glauca)

Psylla, Psylla everywhere

on buds and twigs and all;

lice to eggs and eggs to lice,

in cycle bidding for time,

'til your inevitable fall

and your last host dies.

 

Sulfur butterfly (Terrias hecabe) Order Lepidoptera

Sulfur - that you got your name -

Amorphous.  Beautiful.

Fancy. Bane.

Web spider (Class Arachnida) waits for prey

Arachne was jealous of your art, 

strung with pearls at sunrise

that snare the unwary of any size,

kin or foe, and nothing apart.

Brooding spider with egg mass. Class Arachnida

She protects her brood before the tempest,   

shepherds her tiny ones from the nest; 

ask Charles Darwin the explanation, 

and Robert Bruce a living lesson,

Colored tilapia (Tilapia sp)

Perhaps nothing is sweeter

than putting off for some time

the cares and troubles of the world,

for sweet nothings today - 

and only for today.

Juvenile toad (Bufo) camouflaged with cottony mass

A young toad on a drifting leaf

down the river of no return,

reaches some bank somewhere,

and that's its journey's end.

Annual cicada (Tibicen).  The male makes a shrilling 
call, attracting a would-be mate. Female cicadas 
of all species are dumb.     

The shrill of a Romeo, a love call since,

reverberates through trees, across the fields

until a maiden comes, obligingly yields; 

the singing stops, a new season begins.~