POEM: BEETLE AND FLEA

Beetle and Flea

 "Entomologically-speaking,

you’re as primitive as can be,”

Beetle said to the wayward Flea.

“You hop about strange flesh all day,

drinking blood. But do you stay?

I, all day, roll Pharaoh’s dung

into clever balls—I construct my rung;

I have my place. Can you say more

to defend your race?”

And up spoke Flea:

“Father, no more I’ll add   

to what you’ve said,

save I’ve bit the Pharaoh

and he’s dead.”

                                   

THIS POEM WAS WRITTEN A YEAR OR SO after I started writing poetry in the early ‘aughts’ of this century, and it is one of my favs, because I enjoy the humor and the message that complacency leads to a dangerous arrogance (hubris, the great destroyer of us all). Besides, who doesn't like to see a stuffed shirt get his comeuppance?  The moral is that it’s never a good idea to get too comfortable; life has a way of slapping you on the side of your face with a wet fish. 
And for those who really want to know, there are indeed beetles that specialize in poop: they eat it, live in it, and they use it to incubate their eggs. Female dung beetles bury their larvae in balls of dung (“brood balls”) that they then carefully roll away and store.  I bet that’s more information than you really wanted to know.
Dung beetles are mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings* and are part of their mythology, so we really shouldn’t be so squeamish. Poop was important to ancient Egyptians, just as it is today, for us. It’s part of our own history and literature. 

Who can forget the scene from Don Quixote when hapless, loyal Sancho Panza, unwilling to leave his master’s side as they stood guard on their horses, surreptitiously defecates while remaining in his saddle, which is quite the accomplishment! In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is forced to defecate on the floor in his new Lilliputian home, no doubt involving a cleanup operation that must have taxed Lilliputian environmental services considerably. Or in James Joyces's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom sits in an outhouse doing his business:

"Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone."

 

IN LITERATURE, science and medicine, "poop" through the ages has been an integral part of human existence. And don’t get me started on compostable toilets and the uses of humanure in organic gardening. We flush the good stuff away, people! But that’s a whole other post. The study of poop (scatology) leads to many fascinating discoveries about the kinds of diets we had as ancient people, for example and…oops!…all this pondering on poo has made me in need of answering the call of nature. See ya later…Oh, and all this talk about nether matters helped me avoid talking about my poem. Sweet!

Cheers, Jake  

* In ancient Egyptian religion the scarab was also a symbol of immortality, resurrection, transformation and protection much used in funerary art. The Egyptian sacred scarab is a dung beetle.

The life of the scarab beetle revolved around the dung balls that the beetles consumed, laid their eggs in and fed their young, representing a cycle of rebirth.

In addition, The Egyptian god Khepri (Ra as the rising sun), was often depicted as a scarab beetle.. The ancient Egyptians believed Khepri renewed the sun every day before rolling it above the horizon, and then carried it through the other world after sunset, only to renew it, again, the next day.
-Wikipedia.