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WAITOMA CAVE
  
After the visit to the sulphur geysers,
the mud pots of New Zealand’s Rotorua,
go see Waitoma Cave, the glow-worm grotto:
the dark clatters around you, chills the full waters
beneath, and in the high-altitude darkness
is a rocky never-seen heaven, pitted
with the luminescence of little green stars,
the tails of a thousand glow-worms,
not worms but two-inch grubs, relations
of the fungus-gnat family, evolved long
times gone from depending on spores,
white worms indeed if you could see them
with bums which make their shit shine green
and enticing.  They munch other gnats, even
their elders, caught with dangled fibrils.
Soft eating machines, nine months in one place,
they pupate into four-day mating machines
with no means or need of eating, angelically winged
and devoted to primal loving, for what is love
if not our commitment to the next generation?
  
Outside the cave is true night: true stars
devour themselves and excrete the seed
to make other stars, while around all suns
is an infinite regress of nothing, pointless algebraic form
iteratively digesting its own functions
for parturition of space-times like ours and doubtless
countless designs we cannot even imagine.
  
And if Celestial Love be the name
for what spawns worlds to share its existence
who am I to praise or deplore?
Such love has no choice, obeys its nature.
I join the game, beget grubby children, ideas,
obeying the laws, yet choosing
(since accident gave me a mind to)
to oppose love with pity, which to understand
has taken a lifetime, preferring now shy compassion
for this little earth-crust of trusting animals.
  
My little loves, I’d call them—one desolate word
doing much service, as urine does, denoting
the voiding of waste, invitation to mate,
and the marking of table-lands for hunting—
my animals, it is you I adore and weep for.
What can we do but forgive as we chew
a brother’s femur, squash house-mites we can’t even see?
  
The corporate pennants over the building site
curl softly cyclonic like puppies at play, underfoot
crunch beetle-elytra’d acorns, at the end of the field
a quick slice of gull-white measures the limit
of sight-recognition, and from the albino mansion
which is anchored refurbishing at the park’s edge
autumn unloads its bales of viable comfort
and the sky is an exculpation of trumpets.
  

Alan Marshfield

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