[Tim Murphy]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...nna-Adams.html

Here's a superb poem:

Wasp’s Nest

Beneath our lintel hung a papery breast
nippled with penetrating dark that pierced
the layered curtain of the Queen Wasp’s nest.

Out of this summer palace, princelings flew;
some hunted, some had building-work to do;
the population and the palace grew.

They fetched new wood-pulp, added paper ridges,
and, working backwards along selvages,
turbaned the nest in mummy-bandages.

A cabbage with grey leaves, drilled by a worm:
a pendent dome: a tumour on the beam:
a paper brain that hummed with thoughts of home:

the prison-chapel of a pregnant nun
who crouched in prayer, walled up from the sun,
to bear her thousand children one by one.

Her nursery, inverted tree of pods,
has hatched its hundreds, but the Queen still adds
more eggs, possessed by Summer’s dying gods.

The princes’ number dwindles. Still tight-laced
and elegant as ever – isthmus waist
links tiger-bustle to her pigeon-chest –

the venerable Queen within the walls
sits brooding over trays of cradle-cells
where perfect wasps lie dead beneath their seals.

A secret monument to Summer past,
she desiccates in darkness, grey with dust,
killed by the silent treachery of frost.