Spring glides into summer as
we pause near the footbridge
its weathered span beckoning us
to gaze at the dark pond surface
dotted with fallen locust blossoms.
It’s 2020 and we must stand aside
six feet apart from other walkers
waiting our turn to breathe safely.
Look! my husband says, pointing,
a wild rose bush, Rosa acicularis,
and lurking on the sweetbriar stem
a fuzzy peach-colored globe.
Cynipid eggs in mossy rose galls
Diplolepis rosea infecting stems
wasp larva growing stout inside
gall shelters immune to chemicals.
Wait for fall to rescue the hapless
roses from further cynipid invasion;
wearing gloves, you reach around
prickly stems to pluck the galls
or in late spring thirty or forty
full grown wasps may emerge
aching to lay more eggs—
but this is the Nature Center
where native roses feed squirrels
and birds and mink and mice;
rose hips and galls and wasps
sustaining each other, naturally
locust blossoms making way
for seed pods to form and fill
surviving as we must learn to
by holding the virus at bay.
Margaret Koger, a Lascaux Prize finalist, is a retired school media specialist with a writing habit. She lives near the river in Boise, Idaho where rafters ride the current on sunny summer afternoons, swerving around apids and waving hello to galleries of park sitters on the green banks of the stream. Her poetry has been archived by the City of Boise and has appeared in numerous journals including Amsterdam Quarterly, Forbidden Peak Press, Collective Unrest, Chaffey College Review, Thimble, Inez, Headway, Burning House, Voice of Eve, Tiny Seeds Literary Journal, Ponder Savant, and The Limberlost Review.
Featured image by Malcolm Manners “Rosa acicularis” CC BY 2.0
