This year – I shared a poem in the wake of an amazing coworker, biologist and friend who left the Urban Ecology Center. She offered a workshop to the staff on Dragonflies and Damselflies (Odonata) before she left and it was one of the most beautiful and interesting workshops I have ever attended. It reminded me of the wealth of knowledge that exists within my friends, coworkers and comrades here at the UEC and how lucky we are to have met and learned from each other in this organization.

Notes from an Odonata workshop:

Mighty Toothed One

crunching on exoskeleton excuvia

Meat eater, Green Darner

close your eyes at night and they will see 

faux Cyclops eye unblinking

staring and steady

Wandering Glider, globe skimmer, cosmopolitan and olivaceous 

Spot-winged, Saddlebag,

meadowhawk drift

with the wind guiding and gliding

to rain pond ripe for the tap tap tap of

Abdomen full of eggs

Lestidaes, jewel wings, carnival glass sheen

holding wings open - beauty at rest

Oh dear damsel, zygoptera friend     

why do you fan those symmetrical translucent petals wide open?

Are you regulating your temperature, getting a tan, showing off your stained glass intricacies?

Is it a new stretch from Lyre-tipped Spreadwing yoga?

Is this how you worship or is it a slow non-moving dancing?

Rorschach and art deco wings, what do you tell us

in the blink when you are there and then gone

This young science in its teneral stage still fresh

learning the power of claspers and biting off of heads

Will you reveal what we do not know

if we look underneath the Pruinescence of your souls?

As you swoon and flock, buzz and zip, skim and flutter

Down              down               up                    down

Like 170 maple helicopters as the autumn winds blow through