Great Neopter, who first had learned to fold
His wings at rest and walk upon the ground,
Became the father of a line enrolled
In history as the most diverse yet found.
For from his loins would spring a thousand kinds
Of crawling, flying, leaping, singing things—
The orders of the insects, each that winds
Its story through the coal-swamp, marsh, and rings
Of ancient forest towering overhead
Where Meganeura ruled the humid air
And coal-swamp vapors rose from forest bed
To fill the world with warm and fertile care.
First Blattus claimed the coal-swamp floor
As his great kingdom, warm and damp and wide—
His children filled the rotting wood with more
New generations than the swamp could hide.
The cockroaches, the most ancient of all
Who walked the Carboniferous in such sum
That scholars gave the era's ancient call
"The Age of Cockroaches" in studies come—
Ten thousand times the number of a man
In generations counted from the first,
Blattus spread his dynasty and clan
Through every crack and crevice, quenching thirst
And hunger on the fallen leaf and bark
And every kind of plant-decay that fed
His millions through the forest's warm and dark
And steaming spaces where the coal swamp spread.
From Blattus too would come a colony
Of strange wood-eaters in a later age:
Termitios, who'd build their monarchy
In mounds of royal social heritage—
Where workers tend the royal line alone
And soldiers guard the tunneled passage-way,
And queens lay eggs upon a living throne
While millions toil in darkness every day.
Then Orthopteros leapt across the land
With powerful rear legs that stored the force
Of a thousand springs at evolution's hand—
Each jump a small explosion on the course
Of life lived at the margin of the blade:
The grasshopper who leaps beyond the reach
Of any hunter's claw or ambuscade,
The cricket singing through the summer's breach.
Their songs would fill the night with piercing call,
A language built of friction—wing on wing—
That called the mate across the evening fall
And made the coal-swamp forest, summer, ring.
Great Hemipteros was born with mouth
That pierced the stem and drank what flowed within—
No chewing jaw for him, but always south
Through bark and leaf to where the sap would begin.
His children are the bugs that bear the name
In truest sense: the aphids, shield-bugs, stink-bugs,
The cicadas crying out their ancient fame
Across the summer trees like thunderclaps and drum-thugs
Of high-pitched song too fast for ear to trace:
Their call compressed and slowed would be a song,
But at the speed they live they set the pace
Of summer afternoons the season long.
But of all Neopter's sons the most
Who'd multiply beyond all reckoning
Was Coleopteros, that gilded host
Of beetles hardened by a covering
Of shield-wings Elytra that fold above
The flying wings like armor double-laid—
The tank of insect-kind, who found his love
In every niche that any creature made.
For beetles number in the hundreds of
Ten thousand species counted and described,
And for each kind that's known, there's some thereof
That no eye yet has seen or pen has scribed.
They eat the dung, they eat the wood, they eat
The living plant and grain and every rot—
The beetle's adaptability is complete:
No other order claims so vast a plot
Of insect-kind's dominion on the earth.
From Diptos came the two-winged masters bright
Who traded one pair of their wings for worth
Of speed—the halteres that balance flight
And make of them the acrobats of need.
Their maggots clean the fallen forest floor
Of everything that death and time has freed
For life to use and recycle once more.
The flies keep order in the rotting shade
And speed the return of all that falls to dust—
Without the fly the forest would be stayed
By its own death, unable to adjust.
In time would come great Hymenos true:
The wasps and ants and bees in future age
Who'd build their colonies and castles new
And write the most social chapter of the page
Of insect-kind—where queens command the whole
And workers sacrifice their single lives
For something larger than the separate soul:
The superorganism that thrives and thrives
On coordination past what any mind
Can hold alone, where each part plays its role
And individual death leaves none behind
Since the colony itself becomes the whole.
And Lepidopteron would spread his wings
Of patterned dust in colors past compare,
The scaled and powdered beauty that he brings
To every flower-field and summer air.
His children drink through spiraled tongues unfurled
Into the flower's deep and nectar-bright
Interior—co-evolvers of the world
Who'd partner with the flowering plant's delight.
But many of these nations yet to come
Would wait until the coal swamp gave its way
To drier lands—for now, the restless drum
Of Neopter's children rules the day.
The insects show us what becomes of those
Who multiply their kinds through variation:
A thousand different answers to the woes
Of living—a thousand-fold salvation
From the single path that cannot bend or shift
When change comes calling through the world anew—
Diversity itself becomes the gift
That lets the many thrive where few fall through.
So honor Neopter and all his line:
The beetle's shield, the cricket's midnight song,
The cockroach in his coalfield pantomime—
The ones who proved that many could be strong.