Darwin’s Wasps

Eleanor Hooker

What if, at worst,

God is a dilettante,

or an apprentice

on whose failed design

we currently spin?

I own that I cannot see

as plainly as others do,

and as I should wish to do,

evidence of design

Parasitoids and yet, deft pollinators,

whose host is a butterfly-stone

weighted inside a caterpillar,

into whose body these wasps

oviposit eggs.

and beneficence on all sides of us.

There seems to me too much misery

in the world.

Within its soft and yielding form,

bloated larvae emerge to feast

on the caterpillar’s butterfly dream,

while suffering its vital

organs to pulse and strum.

I cannot persuade myself

that a beneficent and omnipotent

God would have designedly

created the Ichneumonidae

Under venom’s spell, the caterpillar

does not reject the carnage

that consumes it, inside to out,

as it, undead, keeps guard.

with the express intention

of their feeding within the living

bodies of Caterpillars

What of us?

Eden is an altered plain; there is no return—

we have tasted and tested the knowledge tree,

we consume the only rock that hosts us

and, unlike Darwin’s wasps, we’ve emerged

to de-pollinate life’s fruit.

Text in italics from Charles Darwin’s letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860

Text in italics in final stanza from Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Advent’

ELEANOR HOOKER’s third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) is the recipient of the 2022 Michael Hartnett Award. A 2021 recipient of the Markievicz Award, her poetry book for that award, Where Memory Lies, was published by Bonnefant Press in 2023. Eleanor was commissioned to write a poem to mark the bicentenary of the RNLI, and read her poem at Westminster Abbey in March 2024. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Limerick. She holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA (Hons) from the University of Northumbria, and a BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University. Eleanor is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (FLS). She’s a helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She is Programme Curator for the Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School 2024. www.eleanorhooker.com