Tuesday Poem: Paper, Wasp

From Nick Flynn's second collection, Blind Huber, this offering:

Paper Wasp

Because trees grew thick & demon-

full, you felled whole counties,
built walls against the night. Shack

gave way to city, city

to skyscraper, forest to plain. All this time
we've been building beside you,

in the eaves, in the trees your axes missed.
Look at the nest in the rafters,
look closely. Those red

streaks are fragments of your barn, paint
chewed to pulp. Everything

passes through us, transformed.

We chew the words off newspapers,
bodies off billboards,
even your clothespins, look at them closely--

each day thinner.

{Image, flickr}