🇬🇧 The Ladybird

On the bathroom windowsill
A beetle brown and black on white:
Reaching for my mobile phone
Grappling with a bath towel,
I take a photo - drip, ponder;
Foreign biotope for me, here
On the second floor, Côte d’Azur.

I proffer out the photo
To my grandchild, a jolt,
An electrical impulse as
Revulsion, instantaneous,
Immediate; en eruption
Of disgust, but look,
I say, the ladybird.

She’s relieved, looks again,
Ah, she says, a ladybird,
And returns a quiet nod,
A ladybird, that’s good;
Toxic reek, animal of prey
And all that I do not say;
The world of love restored.


Poetic P.S.
Later, I discovered that this particular beeetle is in fact a species of carpet beetle (Anthrenus pimpinella), a member of the large family of skin bettles. But the point is not the precise identification, but what we believe something to be. I was not deceiving my grandchild, just telling her what I thought I saw. And the second point, of course, is that what we see depends on the words we use and choose, all of them.