Today's poem is by Mildred Kiconco Barya

Giant Stag Beetles
       

Friends of dead wood and seclusion,
to know you is to go underground.

It is not known why you sing in your larval form
by rubbing parts of your body together.

Perhaps that's how you speak your presence to your kind.
So you stridulate and give off sounds and eat ginger—

a spiced life, a long childhood
before pupating and finding a new seduction—lights.

The moment you emerge you're ready to copulate.
You've spent up to six years buried under, why waste time?

Though I have seen snakes shedding skin,
never your kind discarding outer layers.

You remain a mystery even as you bare yourself to the light.
As soon as you enter new life among the woodlands, you' re gone.

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Copyright © 2024 Mildred Kiconco Barya All rights reserved
from The Animals of My Earth School
Terrapin Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission