Post PAD: The Weekly Prompt

After the daily Poem-a-Day Challenge in April, the Poetic Asides blog continues their poetry prompts on a weekly basis every Wednesday. I've been participating on a sporadic basis in the weekly challenge, but I did write a poem this week, their first weekly challenge since April ended. The prompt was to write an "unsettled" poem, one that seems inspired by our current times. The Poetic Asides blog is undergoing a transformation this month, and presently we participants are not able to share our results in the comments section, so I thought I would do that here.

I also enlisted the word bank once again from the Sunday Whirl blog. Their bank of a dozen words was: singe, virus, spread, death (pretty uplifting so far, eh?), left, fly, stroke, call, lose, mask, lock, sell. Obviously, this list was inspired by our current situation as well. So what else could I write about? How about another threat, maybe not as widespread, but no less troubling? As usual, I used all twelve words from the bank, and this poem just happened to fall into a loose sort of sonnet structure - a "free verse sonnet", it you will.

As If There Wasn't Enough Bad News

Add to these unsettled times the murder wasp,

a hornet-sized predator with a sting

like the singe of metal, who swoops in like

a virus, spreading death through whole colonies

of honeybees, decapitating them with huge mandibles,

nothing left but their heads, as it flies their bodies

to its nest and masticates them,

food for its young.  In one fell stroke, the hive

is a ghost town, and the wasp will come to call

another day, to kill another community,

little citizens we cannot afford to lose.

Meanwhile, we masked humans in lockdown

try to avoid another predator's sting,

and the news feeds us anything it can sell.