Keeping Time

The mayfly lives two days, a swallowtail butterfly two weeks.
The last generation of monarchs born each year endure
for months flying the hundred mile a day migration,
ribbons, orange and black, unfurl high across the sky.
Dragonfly nymphs thrive five years in streams hiding
under roots and rocks. Arctic woolly bear caterpillars
chew willow leaves for seven. Spiders spin their silk
orb webs for twenty years, liquid in their abdomens pulled
out as threads by gravity, like water stiffening to icicles.

A human life is to the lives of stars as the mayfly’s
is to ours, and yet we feel eternal, until that closing decade
when we understand this might be the last time we see
snowflakes spiral down just as they did that night, delaying
the doctor from reaching the house, when I was born

Awake in the Night

Who knew that the great grey owl can hear
a vole’s heartbeat one foot below the frozen ground,
that a fox can discern the sound of a crow’s
wings flapping a third of a mile away,
that a honeybee’s waggle dance conjures
air waves that other bees’ antennae decipher,
that the wing-beat of the chickadee vibrates
at frequencies detected by the butterflies it eats,

so when I wake to quiet in the night, I know
there are sounds I can’t hear, a bat’s
ultrasonic clicks, the velvet wings of an owl
as it swoops down, your heartbeat

Patricia Hemminger’s experience of growing up in rural UK, along with her science background and love of nature, informs and inspires her poetry. Spillway, Streetlight Magazine, River Heron Review, Humana Obscura, and Slant, among others, have kindly published some of her poetry. She holds a PhD in chemistry and is a graduate of NYU’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program and of Drew University’s MFA Poetry Program. Her chapbook What Do We Know of Time? (FLP) was published in 2022, and her second chapbook, All Things Gone, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks in 2025.