Gogga was a world alive – was Christmas beetle
joy before December’s storms
until their bronze buzzing turned
everywhere irritation but swatting impossible:
endearingly beautiful-stupid.

Gogga was shriek of fear for scorpion:
tiny menace on the washing stung mother
and darkness dropped for two long winter days.

Gogga was dung beetles and stinkbugs and grasshoppers:
summer’s fascination with their Puddleglum legs,
their leaps and the races they gave us.
Locusts, more gregarious
drilled into our heads their eating
destruction; driving home
a crunching screen-wiper horror dark cloud
eating and dying, eating and dying the world into plague.

Gogga was not butterflies, though it should perhaps have been;
but moths slipped in and out of gogga-dom
their nightly fluttering inside bare knees
a Moro reflex leaving silver dust, smeared soon to simple dirt.

Gogga was Tshongololo,
shiny black, stately milli-red-footed progress
impeded by highly polished floor - tempting fascination.
A twig, run idly down his side
curled him insect hedgehog, or unleashed the
squirming, strange, writhing S-s of his legs-up rage;
till we learned, twigs arrested, how those shapes
would tickle our dreams to a laughing, breathless death.
Gogga was Mantis a rarer find: delicate in green or brown,
eyes huge moons on tiny upside down pyramid head.
But game: tiny fists lifted, when tormented,
four legs foursquare firm,
the torso-thorax lifted with all the elegance of Nureyev’s
grand jeté elevation; eyes unblinking, intense.

Mantis is a Kalahari god, her foolish longing to capture the moon,
pouncing on puddles, splintered her eye.
She prays now, they say, knowing her place and
when she comes to your house, gogga
is a tiny blessing. Gogga is the world alive.

*Gogga is a colloquial Afrikaans word for insects, used also as an endearment for small children.