‘Stings’

Suwan Choi is an artist inspired by the beauty of insects. Through vibrant, detailed work, she captured the intricate patterns and forms of these creatures, aiming to raise appreciation for their role in nature.

Stings

One summer’s day,
a boy of six,
I held between two fingertips
a wasp, half dead,
pinioned on a blade of grass.
Icarus, smashed by the sun.
The full brutality of the natural world
in dappled shade of a suburban garden.

Its wings vibrated in my hand,
wet black antennae stand.
I couldn’t look away.
I often held ants and beetles,
gave them names,
imagined groups of friends,
grand adventures, endless games.
I was an only child.

The wasp trembled,
a dull grey stinger’s tip,
like my mum’s sewing needle,
pushing from its
shiny tiger-stripes,
slid through my soft skin,
into the fine lines
of my pink fingerprint.
A new sensation,
my own creation.

I still see it
as clearly as my hands
typing this.
As the sting withdrew
it left a little black
fragment of her,
like a splinter
in my finger.
A love note
I read and read.
Memory swims
beneath the skin.

A numb pulse through my nail
like an electric fence,
like the ones I’d grip in secret,
as we walked the fields behind the house.
Until my mother
told me to stop.
Why do you do that?

Pain over boredom, any day.

Then an angry fire,
red, swollen flesh
not fitting its own skin.
A cold line close to the bone
as the sting
eased into the bath of my blood.
I didn’t ask why.
Even as a child I knew
why wasps sting.
Why cousins die.

What happened to the wasp, you ask?
I’d like to say it flew away,
or that I set it gently on the grass,
Prometheus unchained.

I crushed it.

Its guts, slimy off-white,
like the inside of tissues
after a bad cold.
To have and to hold. 

Now, when wasps drift near and others turn to run,
my body recalls that summer’s day, that warming sun.
I tell them: It’s just pain.

But those who run are not scared of pain.
They’ve known plenty,
made it their companion all the same.
They’ve imagined something worse
in its absence,
filled each flicker of its flight
with their every fear,
so it has become a shadow.
A buzzing uncertainty, full of terror,
that stalks and chases them
across the beer gardens of England.

A friend once said
there are two kinds of us:
those who have been stung,
and those still waiting.

Who can say
which is better?
To know what’s coming,
or to just keep running,
from the shadow of it.

That stings.

James Goddard lives in England in the year 2025, so spends much of his time thinking of other places and other times. He studied classics and philosophy, and tells the stories of people history forgot, or never knew, to give voices back to those erased. Most of the time, he tells these stories to his daughter. He writes at: https://meditationsonpermafrost.substack.com/