Description
Pitchers and Platitudes Pitcher plants are flushed with red: Their labial flaps all sanguine With oxygenated blood, Their roots: lungs, breathing cold earth, And lips slippery as slugs, Sugar-slimed, primed to swallow, Each long, gaping gullet yawning With foetid breath. Just so, Death Is slicked up by our own sick Confections: that old lick-salve Of abstract nouns: Honour, Faith And Glory, those lurking wraiths, Sweet catalysts of decay ? The enzymes which numb our pain As we souls are spluttering, Drowning, each guttering flame Sweltering in the grim stoup Of Remembrance, and watching The world fade through the stained glass Of our slaughterhouse-prison: Little translucent prisms At which we claw, scrape and flail. Thus, plants? monumental patience Prefigures man?s murder-patents: The hijacked plane, the atom bomb, The burning boat, the chambered tomb. Poem by Giles Watson, 2010. I have long been planning a poem inspired by the parallel evolution of carnivorous plants, but chose to turn it into a meditation on Wilfred Owen?s ?Dulce et Decorum Est? in response to Carol Ann Duffy?s own appropriation of his ?Anthem for Doomed Youth? (?Passing Bells?, New Statesman, 11 October 2010, p. 55.) Pitcher plants of the genera Sarracenia and Darlingtonia offer insects a ?gift? of nectar at the ?lip?, which entices each victim down a slippery tube, from which there is no escape. In Darlingtonia, ?The green tube is veined with red; the hood and top of the tube are thickly clothed with whitish, translucent windows through which trapped insects might vainly try to escape until, exhausted, they fall into the depths.? (Alexander F. Skutch, Harmony and Conflict in the Living World, Oklahoma, 2000, p. 101.)

Tags
pitcher, plants, war, pacifism, carnivorous, plants, flora, botanical